The dynamics I’ve described can be seen in discussions about uses of expressions in secondary senses. The phenomena of such uses are taken from ordinary language—from the linguistic life of the ordinary person (where else would they be taken from?). And when we philosophers account for them, we do our best to tame them—to present, describe, and account for, those uses as part of ordinary life. That, however, means for us that we should find a way to make these phenomena appear as un-weird as possible, as mundane as we could. Reasonableness, or at least un-weirdness is a condition on a proper account. In fact, I think, we philosophers thereby risk mischaracterizing the very phenomena we seek to account for. And I want to correct that a bit here and expose a weird side of ordinary language. I will claim that secondary uses—also the uses made ordinarily in ordinary life—are nonsense. Ordinary language thus employs—quite ordinarily —a kind of use of nonsense. That’s how weird ordinary language could get.
One way to see that secondary uses of language are nonsensical is by putting them alongside a closely related use of language. In the Brown Book (p. 158 ff.) Wittgenstein talks about the word “particular.” He makes a distinction between transitive and intransitive, or reflexive, uses of a term, and these uses are also taken from ordinary language (where else?). Wittgenstein writes:
[T]he use of the word “particular” is apt to produce a kind of delusion and roughly speaking this delusion is produced by the double usage of this word. On the one hand, we may say, it is used preliminary to a specification, description, comparison; on the other hand, as what one might describe as an emphasis. The first usage I shall call the transitive one, the second the intransitive one. Thus, on the one hand I say “This face gives me a particular impression which I can’t describe.” The latter sentence may mean something like: “This face gives me a strong impression.” These examples would perhaps be more striking if we substituted the word “peculiar” for “particular,” for the same comments apply to “peculiar.” If I say “This soap has a peculiar smell: it is the kind we used as children,” the word “peculiar” may be used merely as an introduction to the comparison which follows it, as though I said “I'll tell you what this soap smells like:....” If, on the other hand, I say “This soap has a peculiar smell!” or “It has a most peculiar smell,” “peculiar” here stands for some such expression as “out of the ordinary,” “uncommon,” “striking.” (BB 158)
Now, Wittgenstein also talks in the same context of “straightening out” an expression that is used in a seemingly intransitive way, and this effectively means translating it into a transitive form. Sometimes this can be done, as in the case in the quotation above where “This soap has a peculiar smell” is explained by: “it is the kind we used as children.” This specifies what is meant by ‘peculiar’; and thereby, what in the first instance may have appeared to be an intransitive use is revealed by the translation to really be transitive. Such translating, however, cannot always be performed. When words like “particular” or “peculiar” or “striking” or “notable” are used to emphasize in the way Wittgenstein describes, they are not translatable—or, more accurately, they cannot be straightened out into a transitive form. And this has to do with the fact that the emphasis here is of a particular, special, form: In such cases Wittgenstein says,
we let the picture sink into our mind and make a mould there. (BB 163)
Wittgenstein mentions several very ordinary cases in which we use intransitive forms of speech to emphasize, such as "take it or leave it!" and "that's that!" And we (the ordinary person included) do something similar too when we sometimes wonder at something that is perfectly ordinary—as someone may count the toes of a newborn baby and say “She has five!” or reflect on their life and say “What has happened to that young person I once was.” All those cases involve a similar kind of linguistic intention. They involve a kind of focused mental attention on something, as if by that special act of attention, we are extracting the thing out of its ordinary place in the world, and contemplating it independently.
Connecting this with the issue of secondary and absolute uses of expressions, I would like to suggest that some uses of terms in secondary and absolute senses resemble intransitive uses. We can begin to see the connection in this: Wittgenstein insists, with regard to secondary and absolute senses, that they are not similes or metaphors, meaning by that that they cannot be explained literally, or translated into non-figurative expressions. And even if we think that some metaphors are like that too, the important thing here is the distinction Wittgenstein makes between figurative uses of language that can and those that can’t be so translated. Anyway, the situation here seems to resemble the case of those intransitive uses that cannot be “straightened out,” and translated into transitive form: In both cases we have a kind of untranslatability as a grammatical, essential, feature of a use of language.
How is nonsense related to all this? Wittgenstein says about intransitive uses:
We appear to ourselves to be on the verge of describing [… specifying the peculiarity, for instance], whereas we aren’t really opposing it to any other way. We are emphasizing, not comparing, but we express ourselves as though this emphasis was really a comparison of the object with itself; there seems to be a reflexive comparison. (BB 159)
The form of emphasis Wittgenstein describes is expressed by a kind of comparison—a comparison of a thing with itself. By means of such comparison we draw, and try to arrest, attention to the thing. Now, a reflexive comparison, a comparison of something with itself, is not really a comparison. It may look like a comparison—like a straightened out way of saying something, but it is not really straightened out. “We are, as it were, under an optical delusion which by some sort of reflection makes us think that there are two objects where there is only one” (BB160). Wittgenstein jokes about such comparisons elsewhere when he says:
Imagine someone saying: “But I know how tall I am!” and laying his hand on top of his head to prove it. (PI §279)
This using one’s own height as a measuring rod with which to measure one’s own height is patently nonsense. But Wittgenstein mentions an almost identical kind of case in the BB discussion, and there it is not a joke:
“He has a particular way of sitting.” But the answer to the question “What way?” would be “Well, this way.” (160)
Here, the words are employed. This is not patently nonsense. We do sometimes use the language of comparison in this way.
But now the question is this: how is it that in one sort of case the words seem obviously nonsense, a joke at best, and in the other case the very same form of words seems to make sense? Indeed, we may not be too alarmed by that, because this happens in other cases: if the cashier at the store tells me ‘Have a nice day!’ and I in response say: “You know I have two feet,” in most circumstances that would probably not make much sense; it would just be weird. But if I know she is trying to locate a person who has recently lost their leg, the same words coming from me may make sense after all. It may thus seem that we don't really have a problem: it may seem that we can simply say that the self-comparison makes sense in one case, and doesn't in another.
But I think this is wrong. We still have a problem. And the reason we do is that the situation is different in the self-comparison cases. It is not, I believe, that a change of context makes the comparison of the thing with itself meaningful sometimes, for self-comparison is not a comparison and the emphasis-context does not change that. I am not sure what, if anything, would. And furthermore, there really is no way to take the logical peculiarity out of the case; it would in fact be wrong to try. This is what I take it means to say that such cases are characterized grammatically by a kind of untranslatability: This untranlatability here really indicates a much larger problem about clarifying the meanings of such uses of language. We are, in a sense, barred from clarifying them. We are stuck with the logical peculiarity here. This may seem like a problem, something we need to save ourselves from, not to mention the ordinary language speaker. But I believe this is really not too bad. Although something weird is happening, nothing problematic does. For in fact we need the logical peculiarity; we are using it; it is part of our intention. And so the question remains: how is it possible for a nonsensical form of words to sometimes makes sense after all? how is it possible for us to intend to speak nonsense?
What I believe happens in such cases is this: when a self-comparison is made with the intention to measure something—as in the PI case, the intention is frustrated by the failure to make any real comparison, and the words “This is how tall I am” while laying a hand on top of one’s head is nonsense. It fails to function in any intended way. However, when the purpose of the self-comparison is that kind of emphasis Wittgenstein describes, the situation is different. That particular form of emphasis Wittgenstein talks about—that making of a mold for something in our mind, that taking something out of its ordinary place in the world alongside other things and making a special place for it, looking at it as if it were unique--requires a nonsensical form of expression: The nonsense, in other words, is part of the method of emphasis here, it goes to define the emphasis. The emphasis we have here, in other words, is a special kind of emphasis; it is emphasis-by-nonsense. And to see how the nonsense here allows for emphasis, consider again what we try, intend, to do when we emphasize in this way: By emphasizing something in this way, we intend to be contemplating it in a special way, we intend to make its specialness apparent to ourselves. And since this is our intention, nothing routine or ordinary and no familiar language game will do. If we are to achieve this kind of emphasis, we have, as it were, to take the thing out of the language game completely, and contemplate it independently—in light of itself and nothing else. In this way, the nonsense becomes part of the emphasizing, part of our intention whether we recognize it or not.
Connecting this again to secondary and absolute uses, the point of making secondary and absolute uses of expressions is similar to that of emphasizing by comparing a thing with itself. In using expressions in secondary or absolute senses we purposefully use expressions in a way that disengages them from their ordinary grammar, we intentionally take them out of the language game. Saying of a weekday, for example, that it is fat (if one is so inclined to talk) purposefully treats it as if it were a biological entity. Saying of a portrait on the wall that it is looking at us purposefully treats this inanimate object as if it had a mind. Saying of a road that it is absolutely the right one treats it as having a value that cannot be measured. And the purpose of that is, as in the emphasis by self-comparison cases, to take something out of its ordinary place in the world alongside other things and to make a special place for it. And as in the self-comparison cases, the nonsense in such cases is part of the method of doing that, part of the intention. Taking this weirdness out of those forms of words, trying to save the ordinary person from nonsense here, would miss the point of this use of language, would mischaracterize the intetion.