I’m a realist. I think there is a world beyond words and that the aim and purpose of (at least some parts of) language is to describe that world. Of course, not all parts of language need serve this purpose. For instance, perhaps the aim of poetry is to encourage ways of thinking where the connection to reality is far from central, so that to charge poetry with failing to provide an accurate description of reality would just be to miss the point.

Still, I think that language evolved as a means of conveying information, of making claims about the world, and that much of what we do with language today still has ‘describing reality’ as its job description. To my mind, this seems like an evidently reasonable claim, and it seems to have a fair amount of intuitive appeal, so why might one think otherwise? Why might someone think that language doesn’t describe reality at all?