"August Schleicher, the First Controversialist in Linguistics"- Schleicher intended to promote a naturalistic turn in the study of language:- Naturalistic in Schleicher context meant empirical and historical;- He polemicized against the classical philological approach to the study of language that had been developing in indo-European linguistics since at least the ideas of Schlegel: - - Then Schleicher adopted from his friend Ernest Haeckel the Darwinian perspective on evolution, proposing that language was the natural object that could satisfy the so called missing link;- Schleicher developed the branching method, the tree diagramming method to represent the genetic relationship among languages;- In a sense it was Schleicher who originated the biological approach to the study of language;Some questions:How e why does a controversialist attitude emerges in a scientific discipline at the same time defining it and making it a science? -Maybe some answers will be find starting from the transformations occurred to the argumentative forms at the end of the 19th century (see Plantin); - This same fact is directly related to the opposition linguistics and philology;Some ideas:A controversialist is not a natural born kind, it is allowed by its context. 1. "Controversies are indispensable for the formation, evolution, and evaluation of (scientific) theories and practices, because it is through them that the essential role of criticism --in engendering, improving, and controlling the 'well-formedness' and 'empirical content' that grant 'objectivity' to scientific theories and practices-- is performed".[As controversias sao indispensaveis para a formacao (constituicao), evolucao (desenvolvimento) e avaliacao das teorias e praticas (cientificas), pois e atraves das controversias que e realizado o papel fundamental da critica, a saber, a criacao, aperfeicoamento e controle da relacao entre a 'consistencia formal (descritiva e explicativa) e o conteudo empirico' (well-formedness and empirical content) a qual garante a 'objetividade' para a teoria e pratica cientificas.]2. "The rigorous study of controversies is an indispensable means for providing an adequate description of the evolution of scientific ideas and for the understanding of their meaning. For controversies are, in fact, the natural 'dialogical context' where theories are elaborated and where their meaning progressively crystallizes through the challenge of actual objections".[O estudo detalhado das controversias e um dos meios indispensaveis para o fornecimento de uma descricao e compreensao (interpretacao) adequadas da evolucao (desenvolvimento) das ideias (teorias e praticas) cientificas. Pois as controversias constituem, de fato, o 'contexto dialogico' em que estas teorias sao elaboradas e no qual o significados destas teorias progressivamente se cristalizam, atraves do confronto de ideias --entre proposicoes e objecoes.]3. "Once started, a controversy has no a priori limits as to where it will stop in its questioning of entrenched beliefs, concepts, methods, modes of interpretation, data, criteria of relevance, norms of formulation, acceptance and rejection of hypotheses, and other components of the scientific enterprise. Nor does it ensure that a 'solution' for the problem(s) it addresses will be found. Such an unrestricted questioning and problem handling may lead to a situation of radical openness in a given field, which in turn creates conditions that are favorable --and perhaps essential-- for the emergence of radical innovation".[Uma vez iniciada, uma