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wedrifid comments on Proofs, Implications, and Models - Less Wrong
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Tried an edit.
Math professors certainly understand instinctively what connects premises to conclusions, or they couldn't do algebra. It's trying to talk about the process explicitly where the non-modern-logicians start saying things like "proofs are absolutely convincing, hence social constructs".
A math professor who failed to get a solid course in formal logic sounds unlikely... (If it's not what you are saying, it's not clear to me what that is.)
I go to a Big Ten university where the graduate-level sequence in formal logic hasn't been taught in six years.
Update: It's being taught again in the fall semester!
I never got a course in formal logic, and could probably have been close to being a math professor by now.
Yes, well, the problem is that many courses on "logic" don't teach model theory, at least from what I've heard. Try it and see. I could've just been asking the wrong mathematicians - e.g. a young mathematician visiting CFAR knew about model theory, but that itself seems a bit selected. But the modern courses could be better than the old courses! It's been known to happen, and I'd sure be happy to hear it.
(I'm pretty sure mathbabe has been through a course on formal logic and so has Samuel R. Buss...)
When I went to Rutgers, the course on proof theory and model theory was taught by the philosophy department. (And it satisfied my humanities requirement for graduation!)
At Yale, the situation is similar. I took a course on Gödel's incompleteness theorem and earned a humanities credit from it. The course was taught by the philosophy department and also included a segment on the equivalence of various notions of computability. Coolest humanities class ever!
I shudder to think of what politics were involved to classify it as such, though.
Probably it was that a Phil professor wanted to teach the class, and no one cared to argue. It's not things like which classes are taught that are the big political fights, to my knowledge; the fights are more often about who gets the right to teach a topic of their choosing, and who doesn't.
Have you read the book of Marker? I love that thing to pieces.
I think the correct syntax here is "...his colleagues disagree with X while declining to say which premise..., or to point out which step...", which links the two infinitives "to say" and "to point out" to the verb "declining". ETA: The current edit works too.