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In his book and article Cognitive Pragmatics, Bruno Bara presents a "unified" theoretical account of the mental processes involved in communication (Bara 2010,2011). Through its inclusion of different strands of research, this account is broader than that advanced by any of its predecessors (e.g. Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory 1995 [1986]). In this way, the centrality of behavior games—a notion that echoes Wittgenstein's concept of a language game— brings a much-needed social dimension to a cognitive explanation of communicative processes. The emphasis on the validation of key claims through the study of how pragmatic skills develop in children and become disrupted through disease and injury places the somewhat neglected areas of developmental pragmatics and clinical pragmatics, respectively, at the center of theoretical work in pragmatics. The use of modern brain imaging techniques (e.g., fMRI) to establish the neural correlates of communicative processes introduces the nascent discipline of neuropragmatics into pragmatic theorizing. As this list demonstrates (and it is not an exhaustive list by any means), there is plenty to engage the reader in Bara's cognitive pragmatics. The issues I want to address are the role of theorizing in pragmatics and whether a "theory" of the mental processes involved in communication is even intelligible. To this extent, while applying to Bara's proposals, my comments are also relevant to theory construction more widely in pragmatics.

Theorising in pragmatics: Commentary on Bara's Cognitive Pragmatics: The Mental Processes of Communication (MIT Press, 2010).