ABSTRACT
There are many different ways of investigating cognitive processes, including the traditional experimental methods of psychologists, studies of thinking across different cultures, and ethnomethodological accounts of practical reasoning in everyday behavior. In this paper a further source is considered—examples of disordered thought. Some data taken from a case study of a child with the disorder known in the speech pathology literature as semanticpragmatic disability is presented and analyzed, in keeping with a strategy common in the social sciences of discovering the workings and structure of a system through an analysis of its malfunctions. Some concepts from Artificial Intelligence (Al) are used to support the analysis, and, at the same time, I show how the study of semantic-pragmatic disorders can provide a perspective on thinking which may be useful to Al.
