Is the notion of conversational implicature
still useful? What role if any do Grice's maxims
and Cooperative Principle still play in
computational and formal approaches? The
notion of conversational implicature, and the Cooperative
Principle, have been useful and important
to some researchers in thinking about how language
works in real use. But however useful they are for
guiding a researcher's thinking, they are not useful as
an actual part of an implementation. The maxims,
on the other hand, play no useful role whatsoever in
any computational or formal approaches, even at a
theoretical level. They are in fact harmful, because
they form a misleading taxonomy.