Abstract

Both Science Studies and postcolonial theory are interdisciplinary attempts to interrogate terms like modernity and rationality at a fundamental level. Work in traditional History and Philosophy of Science by thinkers like Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend has had significant implications for methodology in the social sciences and the humanities. A case in point is the idea of incommensurability, which was developed by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyeraband in the early 1960's. Simply put, incommensurability implies that different theoretical frameworks cannot be measured against the same scale. The idea of incommensurability has not been restricted to scientific theories but has also been extended to the realm of language and culture; in particular with regard to the question of whether cross-cultural understanding or translation is possible. ;Using the ideas of incommensurability and inter-cultural translation as a central problematic, I demonstrate how cultural difference is theorized in an ahistorical way by a wide range of figures ranging from Karl Popper to Bruno Latour. I also examine recent work in Science Studies by Haraway, Harding, Pickering, Galison and Ihde. I argue that the foregrounding of questions of materiality, embodiment, and performativity in the work of these theorists offers new and more productive ways of engaging the problem of what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls "translating life-worlds." In the final section of the dissertation, I examine the work of the Subaltern Studies collective, as well as the fiction of Mahasweta Devi which serves as a reminder of the difficulty of engaging with ways of being in the world that are substantially different from the ones that we take for granted