The great convergence: science, modernity and the dilemmas of ethnocentrism

Abstract

This article registers a theroetical dilemma. On the one hand, the adequacy of the notion of modernity articulated by means of tradition/modernity comes to be profoundly destabilized by non-Eurocentric anti-essentialistic narratives of science; on the other hand, in spite of this instability, the idea of modernity remains the epistemological frame to provide an explanation of this same instability, by reformulating, extending and eluding it. The article brings into consideration recent radical, revisionist and innovative standpoints about the relation between science and modernity in global, dialogical, postcolonial, civilizational, and connected histories of science. The conceptual and terminological dimension of the critique to Eurocentrism is drawn by exploring issues of epistemology and methodology related to the historiographical inquiries in modern science that are considered. These counter-narratives of scientific modernity are crucial to reconstruct the notion of science in a broader context that relocates the global and colonial character of science at the center of a possible, renewed and potentially more adequate historical and sociological understanding of modernity. Nonetheless the dilemma introduced remains inextricable within the epistemic territory of modernity itself; there follows the need for sociological imagination to point towards the possibility of unthinking modernity.