Richard Rorty argues that words do not get their meaning from correspondence to reality, but rather, words get their meanings from how we use them in the contingent language games we play. Give some examples that illustrate the difference between the coherence theory of truth and the correspondence theory (keep in mind, words like “cool” do not refer to a thing in the world, but issues concerning the rights of women or the state of the environment do seem, in the view of some theorists, to refer to more than a linguistically-constituted social consensus). After explaining his critique of correspondence, say whether or not you think Rorty is correct to replace truth about Reality with what our peers will allow us to say about “reality.”
