Ana Carla Rodrigues Ribeiro

This project investigates the origin and formation of language in Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1744), relating the concepts of senso comune and dizionario mentale comune to the social and symbolic constitution of the human world. For Vico, language is inseparable from its social and political context, serving as a principle of civil organization and a condition for shared experience. From the three ages (of the gods, of the heroes, of men) and their respective types of languages (divine, heroic, human), he offers a theory of language that mirrors transformations of mind and society. These changes are examined both diachronically, as the historical succession of discursive fields, and synchronically, through the coexistence of symbolic forms in the dizionario mentale comune, an imagistic lexicon shared across peoples and times. Senso comune, as a pre-reflective judgment, structures the field of shared meanings and grounds the possibility of a common vocabulary rooted not in rational abstractions but in sensible and social experience.