A Hardy (Cambridge) Obviousness -- and Aune's second ref. to Grice in "Autobiography"

By JLS
for the GC

Again from Aune's biography at Bayne's History of Analytic Philosophy site:

"We were in real trouble if
we used "by QL" when the derivation was not trivial. An incident they used to
relate with amusement featured Alonzo Church, the editor, then, of the Journal of
Symbolic Logic. Church was revered for his unerring logical judgment, but the
speed of his inferring was supposed to be surprisingly slow and deliberate. As
they described the incident, Church told a class that a particular conclusion was
inferable from certain premises. One of the students asked if the inference were
trivial. Church thought about it for a moment and then said, "I'll tell you next
time." At the beginning of the next class he announced, "Yes, the inference is trivial."
He then proceeded with the next topic on his agenda."

Aune adds:

"In his “Retrospective Epilogue” to his Studies in the Way of Words, p. 325, H.P. Grice spoke of a similar incident involving the Cambridge mathematician, G.H. Hardy. According to Grice, it took Hardy a quarter of an hour to decide if the proposition in question were actually obvious."