ABSTRACT. Wittgenstein does not deny private objects; he denies them a role in our language. They are not a something, but not a nothing either. The role they play in language could be just as well done by a nothing as a something. Nor are the things we talk about connected in a contingent manner with language, such that beyond the limits of language there are things that cannot be expressed in our language. There is not, as the conceptual realist would have it, "something" beyond the limits of language. Both the words "nothing" and "something" belong to language, and beyond its limits, we can say nothing.