With my mind finding similes between the worlds of science and design at the moment, it’s no wonder that many parts of a recent talk by Alan Sokal resonated with me. 

That said, there were also many parts of the talk and questions that followed that really didn’t resonate. Parts that lacked a lot of empathy and compassion in my opinion, and came across more as snide than constructively sceptic.

For me, these negative elements detract from the more salient points about defining science that I’m highlighting here, which has made me question if I should promote or point to it at all.

After some thought, I’ve decided to share the knowledge I believe is beneficial, but beyond crediting the speaker, I’m removing any links back to the talk and organisation that hosted it.

Read the following then, while thinking about the practices and processes of design, and I hope, while also finding the ideas universal, forward thinking and constructive.

Clear thinking combined with a respect for evidence – especially inconvenient and unwanted evidence, evidence that challenges our preconceptions – are of the utmost importance to the survival of the human race in the 21st century.

George Orwell got it right when he observed that the main advantage of speaking and writing clearly, is that when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious even to yourself.

Paraphrased from Orwell:

“If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.”

Politics and the English Language

By science I mean first of all a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world.

This methodology is characterised above all else by the critical spirit, namely the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and or experiments, the more stringent the tests the better, and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test.

One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism, namely the understanding that all of our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete, and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments.

Science tends to link these theories into a unified framework so that, for instance, biology has to be compatible with chemistry and chemistry with physics

I stress that my use of the term science is not limited to the Natural Sciences but it includes investigations aimed at that acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the Natural Sciences.

So science, as I use the term anyway is routinely practiced not only by physicists chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers, and indeed all human beings in some aspects of our daily lives. Of course the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.

Science is a fallible yet enormously successful method for obtaining objective albeit approximate and incomplete knowledge.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The Sciences are nothing more or less than one particular application, albeit an unusually successful one, of a more general rationalist worldview centred on the modest insistence that empirical claims must be substantiated by empirical evidence.

Detailed methods of inquiry must of course be adapted to the subject matter at hand but what remains unchanged in all areas of life is the underlying philosophy. Namely, to constrain our theories as strongly as possible by empirical evidence and to modify or reject those theories that fail to conform to the evidence. That’s what I mean by the scientific worldview.