TOWARDS HISTORIOGRAPHY AS A HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC AND MISSED DIALOGUES. The Influence of Benedetto Croce through Polemic, Silence and Consensus in the 20th Century, in Italy and Beyond

Historical culture often seems to run the risk of erudition which eludes critical thinking and theoretical commitment. Theoretical commitment often pursues argumentative criteria within a certain tradition or model, without justifying the basis determining the adopted scientific orientation. Our claim is that, with such rigid divisions, the mutual benefits deriving from a research commitment which is both object-oriented (language-oriented) and history-aware are not only unearned, but also neither expected nor pursued. According to Moore, “It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which its history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer...” G.E. Moore, Preface to Principia Ethica, 1903 Not only does the history of philosophy seem to be full of difficulties and disagreements. The history of sciences is rich in them too. As an alternative to both the discontinuity line (Kuhn’s The structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962) and the permanent falsificationist attitude (Popper’s Logik der Forschung, 1934), we propose and interrogate a reading of the history of [language] sciences as the history of an actual or missed dialogue. The basic framework is The Logic and Conversation by Grice (1975), with its Cooperative Principle and the four Maxims, further integrated with a diary of actual conversations (demonstrating the punctuation of conversational turns, silences included). Clearly we should expect more than two participants in the dialogue, but instead a polyphonic one, which extends beyond the chronological limits of the lives of the involved authors, who are outlived by their works and deeds. The case study is about Benedetto Croce’s thought concerning philosophy of language and linguistics throughout the twentieth century, both in Italy and abroad: in the debates with Vossler, Sapir, Mathesius, Gemelli, Gramsci, Nencioni and the prevailing ensuing silence. We wish to focus on the capability of dialogue among scholars and intellectuals on the one hand, and to record the (polemic, inattentive, contemptuous) silences on the other hand, which belie the traces of a still influential presence in the Italian cultural context.