Indagini della dialettica

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring the deep theoretical potential of the evidential paradigm proposed by Ginzburg, and at showing how it cannot be regarded as an isolated practice, but rather as a moment participating in the broader web of interactions among plural forms of rationality. Among these, dialectics appears to play a fundamental role in bridging investigative practice, the logic of discovery, and the method of presentation. In the antinomy between the evidential paradigm and the anatomical paradigm, a tertium datur: the dialectical method. Dialectics, in fact, represents the procedural development of a rationality that coordinates and holds together distinct yet interwoven moments: the denaturalization of data, signs, traces, and representations; the interplay between system and deviation, universality and singularity, discovery, abstraction, and exposition; the joint presence and necessary distinction of the determinations of truth and falsehood that cross representation. Through a wide range of references (Ginzburg, Eco, Sklovsky, Brecht, Althusser, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle), the attempt has been made to outline the field of a type of knowledge within which even the practice of the detective fully belongs.