Il dibattito sul Nuovo Realismo: accordo e disaccordo sullo “strato di roccia”

Abstract

The Italian debate on New Realism offers different opinions about the existence of external world: some philosophers, like Ferraris, defend the importance of matters of fact and see them as inemendable data; on the other side, post-modern authors like Vattimo refuse to consider empirical evidences as objective reality and argue, according to Nietzsche, that there are no facts but interpretations. Both authors try to defend their own different positions quoting Wittgenstein’s remarks: for Ferraris the well-known paragraph of Philosophical Investigations about the bedrock is a proof of the realism of Wittgenstein; for Vattimo the variety of language-games leads to a relativist attitude towards external world and values. Without trying to answer the question about realism and relativism, this paper analyses Wittgenstein’s remarks collected in his last work On Certainty and provides an interpretation of author’s position denying both Ferrari’s and Vattimo’s claims. Indeed, according to Wittgenstein, the reality of external world is neither an objective matter of fact nor a subjective occasion for different interpretations: it constitutes the grammatical paradigm of our language, the pragmatic ground of our form of life.