In the annual Sense about Science lecture, Professor Alan Sokal advocates scientific reasoning in public and political life

Evelyn Harvey

What do we mean by science, and how does the scientific outlook translate to other spheres of human activity?

“Science,” says Alan Sokal, “is a worldview giving primacy to reason and the critical spirit”.

Lively and outspoken, the UCL and New York University physicist delivered the annual Sense about Science lecture on 27 February.

Homeopathy and religion came under humorous but scathing attack. Sokal expressed wry amusement at the UK government’s decision to assess the ‘competence’ of practitioners of a scientifically unfounded treatment.

Chairman Matt Ridley supported Sokal by swallowing a whole bottle of homeopathic sleeping tablets on stage. Needless to say, Ridley was still standing by the vote of thanks, given by Lord Taverne, trustee of Sense about Science.

“The epistemological bottom line of religion,” quipped Sokal, moving on to religious scriptures, “is, ‘because it says so’. Faith is not a rejection of reason but a lazy acceptance of bad reason.”

Sokal’s opposition to the ‘fog of verbiage’ that is unscientific reasoning was demonstrated in his 1996 parody of the postmodern, deconstructionalist, ultra-relativist view of science, in which he spun gravity as a ‘social construct’.

Scientific reasoning cannot be equated with myth, nor fact with assertion of fact, continued Sokal. We must be prepared to “modestly insist that empirical claims are substantiated with empirical evidence,” in Sokal’s words.

Sense about Science aims to inform the public of that evidence, in the face of often poor reporting, and to debunk an abundance of myth and pseudoscience.

However, science is not restricted to “a bag of tricks applied to arcane problems,” but is part of the “application of a rationalist worldview,” according to Sokal.

The principles of scientific thought are “not internal to science”, concluded Sokal, but can be adopted in all spheres of life. Science may be practiced by “historians, detectives and plumbers”.

“Scientific scepticism acts like intellectual acid, dissolving dogma and superstition. But this process is far from complete.”