Chris, (01)
I heard the story from Doug L., but I admit that I hadn't
asked about the details of the applicant's background. (02)
CM> I suspect, if there's any truth to the anecdote at all,
> that "professor of logic" worked its way into the story
> for dramatic effect and that the interviewee was really a
> philosophy PhD who had taught a couple of intro logic classes.
> Now *that* I could believe. (03)
Some introductory textbooks spend most of the time on propositional
logic in which a letter like p could represent an entire sentence.
By the time the course gets to FOL, they no longer talk about NLs.
Then more advanced textbooks plunge into the notation without
talking about the translation to or from NLs. (04)
I have met comp. sci. graduate students at good universities
who claimed to know FOL, but who could not map a couple of English
sentences (nothing very tricky) to logic without making horrible
mistakes. I have also known comp. sci. professors who had very
poor backgrounds in logic. I could imagine somebody like that
who was asked to teach an introductory comp. sci. course that
included a segment on logic. (05)
John (06)
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