The first two reports ended with remarks concerning Wittgenstein's quotations form his last works. In this third report this author will be maybe the main conceptual reference, because, in his evolution from the Tractatus logico-philosophicus, (WITTGENSTEIN 1961), published in 1921, to his late works, published after the second world war (WITTGENSTEIN 1953) (WITTGENSTEIN 1956) (WITTGENSTEIN 1974), we can find the most intriguing and critical paraphrase of the evolution of the scientific and philosophical culture of our century. Already in the first report we outlined a parallel between Wittgenstein and Parmenides that in this section we are going to extend. We can confront his Tractatus,
1. The world is all that is the case. 3. A logical picture of facts is a thought. 3.01 The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world. 4. A thought is a proposition with a sense. 4.01 A proposition is a picture of reality. 4.11 The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science. 5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. 6.54 ...He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. 7. What we cannot speak we must pass over in silence.
with Parmenides' 'Peri Phuseos', (COXON 1986),
2. It is indifferent to me whence I begin, for to that place I shall come back again. 3. The one, that a thing is, and that it is not for not being, is the journey of persuasion, for persuasion attends to reality; the other, that a thing is not, and it must needs not be, this I tell you is a path wholly without report... 4....for the same thing is for conceiving as is for being 5. It is necessary to assert and conceive that this is being. 8. Only one story of the way is still left: that a thing is.
Despite of the 25 centuries between them, there is a resemblance, for the apodeictic and almost oracular style, for their foundational role in a new being and knowledge framework, and, most of all, for the tight coincidence between reality, thought and language they advocated. And the late Wittgenstein works recall the words of the old eleatic philosopher described by Plato in his dialogue Parmenides, showing the same subtlety to draw the features of a critical point reached by following the lines of his own earlier foundation. And it was the same apodeictic character of the foundation to lead to the depth of its crisis. It is not possible to give here an account of Wittgenstein's complex intellectual path. Nevertheless, we have to point out his effort for a deep analysis on the connections between reality, thinking and language, which are the 'corners' of our ''semiotic triangle''. His most famous and earliest book, the Tractatus logico-philosophicus, is a masterpiece of the logicist tendencies he followed after Frege, Whitehead and Russell. The 'world' is reduced to a set of atomic 'facts' and the 'language' is reduced to propositional logic. These two worlds are 'isomorphic':
3.21 The configuration of objects in a situation corresponds to the configuration of simple signs in the propositional sign. 5.53 Identity of objects I express by identity of signs, and not by using a sign for identity. (WITTGENSTEIN 1961)
The 'mental' world is a sort of 'passive' connections between them: a ''thought'' is both ''a logical picture of facts'' ((WITTGENSTEIN 1961),3) and ''a proposition with a sense'' ((WITTGENSTEIN 1961),3)). That is, the 'thought' introduces the (logic) representation in the reality and the sense (as reference to reality) in the signs, but without adding anything else. There is no thinking 'subject' and natural science is nothing more than the totality of the true propositions. This approach erases the very idea of intensional semantics, and the language cannot be used to express something more than what it displays as ''logical form of reality''. Tractatus quickly became a reference point for logicist, neo-positivist and behaviorist approaches. Wittgenstein late works appeared only after the second world war, after a long silence, showing some features recalling the old Tractatus, but also a brand new anti-logicist and skeptical 'mood', which appears to be the landing place almost necessarily entailed by that starting point. As in the evolution of Eleatic philosophy from the 'Peri Phuseos' to the Platonic Parmenides, so in Wittgenstein's evolution from the Tractatus to the Philosophische Untersuchungen, the strong mimesis between ''language'' and ''reality'', and the 'lack' of any ''mental'' autonomy, cannot avoid to create room enough for skeptical outcomes.
A crucial point is the impossibility of a true foundation of our formal thinking. When we employ an algorithm, we apply some rules to a set of data, manipulating signs according to this set of rules. But the very idea of obeying the rule is far to be well-founded. For, it always needs an interpretation, that is a new set of rules to be obeyed, and there is no meaning beyond the pure behaviorist ''obeying the rule'' or ''going against it''. And such accord or conflict can not be anyway verified from the subjective point of view of the person who is following the rule. So, to ''follow a rule'' cannot be a private enterprise. Or, rather, it cannot be privately verified:'' ...if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.''( (WITTGENSTEIN 1953), 201). The ''objectivity'' of rule-following can be therefore only a form of ''intersubjectivity'', for any rule is part of a linguistic game, grounded on some sort of social 'form of life', which constrains the behavior of the subjects. (See Kripke (KRIPKE 1982)) As the evolution of Eleatic philosophy occurred amidst the flourishing of the ancient paradoxes, so Wittgenstein's evolution reflects the development of the modern paradoxes (he refers for example to Russell's). Thus we have to consider the appearance at the end of the last century of a new family of antinomical arguments.