HxA Event: "Science & Ideology" with Alan Sokal

Event Title:
"Science and Ideology" with Professor Alan Sokal

Event Topic:
Join the Heterodox Academy campus community at the University of Pennsylvania for a lecture by Alan Sokal, Professor of Mathematics at the University College London, on "Science and Ideology". This event is co-sponsored by the Penn Mathematics Department, the Penn Philosophy Department, the Penn Politics and Government Association, and the Penn Alumni Free Speech Alliance. This event is open to the public!

When: Monday, September 23 at 5:15 PM
Where: 402 Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

About the Speaker:
Alan Sokal is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University whose research focuses on statistical mechanics & combinatorics. However, he is perhaps best known as a critic of postmodernism who orchestrated the so-called "Sokal affair" in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper - "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" - was published by Duke University Press's journal Social Text. He co-authored a book the following year, Fashionable Nonsense, that criticized what he saw as the abuse of science by postmodernist intellectuals. He later reflected on the legacy of the debate his hoax paper provoked in his 2008 book Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture. In 2013, he co-authored a paper criticizing the "critical positivity ratio" concept in positive psychology.

More recently, in 2024, Sokal co-authored an op-ed in The Boston Globe with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins criticizing the use of the terminology "sex assigned at birth" instead of "sex" by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Center for Disease Control. Sokal and Dawkins argued that sex is an "objective biological reality" that "is determined at conception and is then observed at birth," rather than assigned by a medical professional. Calling this "social constructionism gone amok," Sokal and Dawkins argued further that "distort[ing] the scientific facts in the service of a social cause" risks undermining trust in medical institutions. Sokal repeated these criticisms in an editorial for The Critic discussing the broader politicization of science, especially in biology and medicine.

About the Event Host:
The Heterodox Academy (HxA) is a nonpartisan collaborative of thousands of professors, administrators, and students committed to enhancing the quality of research and education by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning. It was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, a Georgetown University law professor, and Chris Martin, an Emory University sociologist.
To learn more about their mission, go to https://heterodoxacademy.org/our-mission/