[infurl]

This is an excellent short introductory video about Grice's maxims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle

The cooperative principle is divided into four maxims of conversation, called the Gricean maxims. These four maxims describe specific rational principles observed by people who follow the cooperative principle in pursuit of effective communication. Applying the Gricean maxims is a way to explain the link between utterances and what is understood from them.

Few if any chatbots or artificial intelligence systems follow these principles and this is why they all sound so dead. If you're a chatbot author then you should attempt to follow these principles to make your creations sound more life-like.

[Art]

If advertisers followed these "rules" most would soon be out of a job!!

[infurl]

If advertisers followed these "rules" most would soon be out of a job!!

That would be a good thing. There should be a special place in hell for professional liars.

[MikeB]

I think the issue with "vegan tomatos" is over-differentiation. If both those words belong to a "vegetables" group, then you've got "vegetable vegetables" so you just remove double ups....

For "I'm out of petrol" & "There's a garage down the road" ... the parent group for "garage" is "place/location" and this supercedes what exactly is meant by "garage"... You could say "There's a jewellery store down the road" and still understand what is meant...

I think falling back to the parent group is how most people do it rather than get stuck up on context

[LOCKSUIT]

Basically say the right things that are relevant, common/frequent, desired. Saying the opposite and hence lying to someone *is* good if it works in the right circumstance, but usually not.

Active context decides how much you'll summarize, and which words you'll use to be less ambiguous.

But after all that they can still recognize your sentence robustly if you kind of failed.

The car > gas station example when stranded, depends on trusting people. You'll tend to ignore the answer attentionally if you don't trust them. You won't (as much) say their answer, enact it, remember it, or use it as context.

[Art]

If advertisers followed these "rules" most would soon be out of a job!!

That would be a good thing. There should be a special place in hell for professional liars.

So what now...Shall we also add lawyers, politicians and auto salesmen to that list? 

[ivan.moony]

If advertisers followed these "rules" most would soon be out of a job!!

That would be a good thing. There should be a special place in hell for professional liars.

So what now...Shall we also add lawyers, politicians and auto salesmen to that list? 

As Bill Murray said once: "When we lie to government, that is criminal. When government lies to us, that is politics." :-)

[yotamarker]

like many food products(almost all nowadays) say :
may contain soy, or may contain minute traces of soy
so when the ingredients say contains vegetable oil, what should one deduce ?!

that maybe they felt like using soy oil ?

or even : produced in a factory than also handles soy, what does that mean ?

what if the warning says : contains sesame, gluton,may contain eggs, sugar, and soy ?!!! is soy related to the contains or the may contain ?!!!!! 

[WriterOfMinds]

like many food products(almost all nowadays) say :
may contain soy, or may contain minute traces of soy
so when the ingredients say contains vegetable oil, what should one deduce ?!

that maybe they felt like using soy oil ?

or even : produced in a factory than also handles soy, what does that mean ?

what if the warning says : contains sesame, gluton,may contain eggs, sugar, and soy ?!!! is soy related to the contains or the may contain ?!!!!! 

If something "may contain soy" or was "produced in a factory that also handles soy," that means that a tiny amount of soy might have accidentally gotten into the product. For someone who has a life-threatening allergic reaction to even miniscule amounts of soy, that may be an important fact. To the average consumer, it means nothing.

If something "contains soy," then soy has been deliberately included in significant amounts. In this case it will also be in the ingredients list somewhere. Common allergens (such as soy) are called out at the bottom of the ingredients list so that people who are allergic can see it obviously, without poring over the whole list, and without needing to interpret that e.g. whey comes from milk, or vegetable oil comes from soybeans.

Both of these practices are courtesies that help communicate information to people who are on a restricted diet because of allergies.

[Don Patrick]

I read Grice's maxims when I was looking for research that might help set up my conversational subroutine back in 2013. While the maxims make several good observations, they treat conversation as a necessarily efficient exchange of information, which sociological research points out is not its only function. What of social and attention mechanisms for instance? I own a thick book about why the word "huh" is a vital instrument of conversation (Also overrated, I will add).

More to the point, the maxims are, as said, descriptive rather than prescriptive, they don't actually offer much to model a system after. The first thing every chatbot creator wants is already for their chatbot to be relevant, they just don't have the systems to achieve that, and the maxim doesn't describe how to. The maxim of "quality" comes down to a conceptual choice of whether to have a chatbot pretend to understand, or suffer constant conversational breakdowns. Grice's maxims are the best arbitrary boxes that one has tried to fit conversation into, is the most positive I can say. I personally find more value in psychology and sociology than linguistics and philosophy where it concerns building conversational systems. Even having a program that takes truth, quantity, relevance, and manner into account, doesn't actually earn my program more appreciation when its understanding of language stumbles.

To end on a positive note, I've seen more videos by this person and it's a good channel.