Can human communication benefit from the unambiguous language and logic developed for computer programming?
Robert Kowalski, Professor of Computational Logic at Imperial College London, will address this question in a free public lecture at the University of Melbourne tonight. In his lecture, Professor Kowalski will argue that recent applications of symbolic logic to computer programming have led to an improved computational logic that can also be used by people. He will survey a number of the well-known books for improving English writing style. He will argue that the advice they give for improving the clarity, simplicity, coherence and effectiveness of English can be extended using the techniques of computational logic. He maintains that computational logic can be used as a basis for thoughts that can be expressed in language, but acknowledges that not all thoughts can necessarily be put into linguistic form. He maintains, nonetheless, that better language, resulting from the use of computational logic, can lead to better thought. He will show, in particular, how we can informally apply th
