Reply to Critics

Abstract

I begin my suggesting that the instincts that accompanied early, 1970s, work in the sociology of scientific knowledge – that we were doing something important – have turned out to be sound. Fifty years later responses to an account of those early years lead to deep discussions about artificial intelligence, the nature of sociology and the nature of philosophy. Thereafter, my responses to the discussants are separated into two parts. I disagree with Filatova that recent work in artificial intelligence has produced devices with human-like intelligence and I explain why. She is certainly right in saying that the output of large language models is more readily mistaken for human-like responses than that of previous generations, but this means only that we have to be more ingenious in exploring the ways they differ from us. Thorpe and Sokolova invite a discussion of the trajectories of sociology and philosophy and their relationship to each other. I find that I no longer know whether I am a sociologist or a philosopher though nowadays I have more sympathy with the concerns of philosophy than with what lies at the centre of attention of contemporary sociologists. This invites a discussion of the quintessential sociology and quintessential philosophy, topics which are very unpopular within the constructivist way of thinking. Nevertheless, such an approach is vital if we are to resist the erosion of science and other academic disciplines and, indeed, the erosion of truth itself under contemporary political pressures. I introduce the notion of ‘formative aspirations’ as a way of defining the essence of science and of activities like sociology and philosophy. I suggest that sociology and philosophy collide in terms of their formative aspirations because both are concerned with the ultimate grounds of truth.