The structure of scientific revolution revisited: the transition from traditional to modern science in India

Abstract

This work discusses Thomas Kuhn’s notion of “incommensurability” which has been the subject of critical discussions up to the present day. Such a discussion is a study by Mario Biagioli who endeavours to demonstrate that incommensurability is less of a structural disruption in the linguistic patterning of its leading figures resulting in a breakdown in communication (unless of course they are bilingual) than something more akin to the Darwinian theory of the evolution of species which it constructed in the process of theoretical change. “Incommensurability” is, therefore, the inability to “procreate” intellectually. The author maintains that this debate only makes sense in the limited context of a shift of paradigm within a given culture. The work attempts to put these different conceptions of incommensurability to the test in the light of the appropriation and
institutionalisation of “Western” science in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author reaches the conclusion that neither Kuhn’s nor Biagioni’s theory works in the case of India, since there would appear to be no incommensurability between the representations of consecutive paradigms.