ABSTRACT
Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions posed, among other things, the problem of whether and how it is possible to translate between scientific paradigms. Thirty years earlier a similar problem of translatability between philosophical and scientific languages had been raised in Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, then published in the immediate postwar years. This chapter examines how Gramsci undertook a translation into his own realist-materialist paradigm of certain key concepts used in the philosophically idealist one of Benedetto Croce, for purposes of illustration and clarity, a reconstruction is given of these terms translated between the paradigms. It offers a comment on Gramsci's approach to the differences between national cultures, and his view of what leads to greater or lesser exactness in such intercultural translations. Finally, the chapter discusses some examples of interparadigmatic translations involving either Gramsci's paradigm or other similar and compatible ones.
