Grice’s Maxims: “Do the Right Thing”

Grice’s maxims are hopelessly vague, and in fact harmful, because they form a misleading taxonomy. While his cooperative principle may be useful at a high level of theoretical analysis, it too is vague, and should not be directly implemented in computational natural language systems. Answers are suggested to a number of this symposium’s topics based on this position. Examples are presented to show that the maxims are too vague and too general, and that they are not really used by computational systems that claim to be based on them. The historical origins of the maxims in Kant’s philosophy are revealed. A comparison is made with Relevance Theory, which seems to provide a better approach to the same phenomena. I conclude by suggesting that it may be too early in the history of computational linguistics to expect to find such broad