Douglas Robinson and Xiaorui Sun present a theory of interepistemic translation, or the encounters between different epistemic regimes of knowledge, as a new way of understanding gaps between knowledge paradigms, such as the historical tension between "East" and "West."

Interepistemic Translation offers a new perspective on understanding how we know, think, and act in the world around us. Robinson and Sun argue that “interepistemic translation," or translating between epistemic regimes, is commonplace. Metaphor and analogy are interepistemic translations. So is almost everything we do.

This book explores interepistemic translation and its foundational tensions through the example of how Chinese and Western culture – and the paradigm gaps between then – have been theorized in histories of science. The co-authors each present case studies from the 20th century. Robinson examines the thought of Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and his later work, and reads Neal Stephenson's future “China,” especially Shanghai, in the 1995 novel The Diamond Age. Sun engages the rhizomatic theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and draws from representations of China vis-à-vis Matteo Ricci, along with reading contemporary Shanghai and Qi theory from traditional Chinese medicine. Taken together, the examples demonstrate the bi-directional, multi-directional, and inter-directional translational work guiding how we perceive then read the world.