Significato del logos e significato degli elementi nel Teeteto e nel Cratilo di Platone

For Plato, the basic tool of philosophical knowledge is logos, not only in the general sense of "reason," but also in the specific sense of knowledge attained by means of "discourse", namely a reason that has a fundamentally linguistic character. This seems to imply that the logos is entirely transparent to itself; and consequently, as we can deduce from the analysis consecrated in the Theaetetus to the so called "theory of the dream", that the elements of which the logos is composed are fully intelligible and devoid of any opacity. However, this claim seems to fail in the Cratylus, where the attempt to show the intelligibility of the elements of language, i.e. letters and syllables, does not succeed. A possible solution to this problem lies in the fact that the elements of language, unlike the natural elements, exhaust their nature in the role they play within the language itself; and therefore the knowledge of this role, just as in the case of the pieces of chess, coincides with the knowledge of the element as a whole.