1. It might not make sense out of context, but here is J.W. Miller talking about language and objects: “It seems of first importance to recognize that any language is a language (a) because it embodies an order, and (b) because this order is understood. The attempt to make this order a fact of consciousness, that is, an object, frustrates the possibility of making the language anything more than a fact, and hence not a language at all. Any statement of the sort, ‘This object of knowledge (a language) is a language for that object of knowledge (things),’ is self-contradictory. It is nonsense. The relation of language to objects is never the relation of object to object” (The Definition of the Thing, publ. W.W. Norton 1980).

2. As, for example: “A proposition does not actually contain its sense, but does contain the possibility of expressing it.… A proposition contains the form, but not the content, of its sense” (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 3.13). Let not anyone either bring up the old chestnut of Wittgenstein's rejection of the Tractatus in his later work. There is much he did not reject, including this principle of language, for the very good reason, I would suggest, that it is right.