The Elucidatory Uses of Wittgenstein’s Scale of Nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland Narratives

Abstract

The world of Carroll’s Wonderland narratives, in which language tests its own limits, overlaps with Wittgenstein’s world of counterexample, and such convergence becomes most overt in Wittgenstein’s example of a nonsensical scale in his Philosophical Investigations (§142). Wittgenstein does not find much use for such a scale, but in this paper it is claimed that Alice’s (mis)adventures with nonsensical language in Wonderland both problematize and provide fresh insights into the use of language in our actual world. Several passages in the Alice books are analysed in order to show how the curious uses of nonsensical language function to negate any theory of the ordinary use of language that is based on the assumption that there is an exact correspondence between words and meanings. This article represents an effort to understand the ways in which nonsensical narratives can throw light on the way we use language in the world. The extraordinary uses of language in narratives like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland provide a challenge to those theories of language that do not sufficiently take into account the ambiguous and imprecise nature of our ordinary use of language.