---
title: 'Language as a tool'
url: 'https://rethunk.englishup.me/instrumentalism'
markdown: 'https://rethunk.englishup.me/instrumentalism.md'
date: '2026-10-30'
description: 'Language as a tool It seems commonplace to regard language as a tool that, like any tool, allows you to do things. John Dewey called language "the tool of tools", as quoted by Brandom (2020). This instrument image was in reaction to an earlier image of language as a picture, the idea that language …'
---

# Language as a tool

It seems commonplace to regard language as a tool that, like any tool, allows you to do things. John Dewey called language "the tool of tools", as quoted by Brandom (2020). This instrument image was in reaction to an earlier image of language as a picture, the idea that language represents reality.

Columbia School Linguistics posits instrumentalism in its conceptualising of language (in distinction to a compositional view). And like Dewey's substitution of tool imagery for picture imagery this is fine as far as it goes. That is, as far as remembering that language is wielded by users and so should not be analysed as separate from them.

But instrumentalism requires that the ends be independent of the means. In order to join two pieces of wood you can use a number of tools - glueing, nailing, screwing etc. But one of the essential features of language is that it can and does create new ends, all the time. And these ends cannot be separated from their means, we cannot have these novel ends except by using language.

**References:**

Brandom, R. (2020). [Week 3 Presentation Notes: Rorty on Pragmatism, Truth, and Antirepresentationalism.](http://www.pitt.edu/%5C~rbrandom/Courses/Antirepresentationalism%20(2020)/Week%203%20Presentation%20Notes.pdf) Anti-Representationalism as Neopragmatism and Global Expressivism. University of Pittsburgh delivered September 1, 2020.

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