Name Elliott Sober | Role Philosopher | |
 | ||
Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Books Unto others, Core questions in philoso, Evidence and evolution, The Nature of Selection, Did Darwin Write the Origin Ba | ||
Elliott sober some questions for atheists to think about
Elliott Sober (born 6 June 1948, Baltimore) is Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin–Madison. Sober is noted for his work in philosophy of biology and general philosophy of science.
Contents
- Elliott sober some questions for atheists to think about
- Elliott sober parsimony and chimpanzee mind reading
- Academic career
- Philosophy
- Philosophy of biology
- Parsimony
- Published books
- References
Elliott sober parsimony and chimpanzee mind reading
Academic career
Sober earned his Ph.D in philosophy from Harvard University under the supervision of Hilary Putnam, after doing graduate work at Cambridge University under the supervision of Mary Hesse. His work has also been strongly influenced by the biologist Richard Lewontin, and he has collaborated with David Sloan Wilson, Steven Orzack and Mike Steel, also biologists.
Sober has served as the president of both the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association and the Philosophy of Science Association. He was president of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (Division of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science) from 2012 until 2015. He taught for one year at Stanford University and has been a regular visiting professor at the London School of Economics.
Philosophy
One of Sober's main fields of research has been the subject of simplicity or parsimony in connection with theory evaluation in science. Sober also has been interested in altruism, both as the concept is used in evolutionary biology and also as it is used in connection with human psychology. His book with David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: the Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (1998), addresses both topics.
Sober has been a prominent critic of intelligent design. He also has written about evidence and probability, scientific realism and instrumentalism, laws of nature, the mind-body problem and naturalism.
Philosophy of biology
Sober's The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus (1984) has been instrumental in establishing the philosophy of biology as a prominent research area in philosophy. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The Nature of Selection...marks the point at which most philosophers became aware of the philosophy of biology." In his review of the book, biologist Ernst Mayr wrote "Sober has ... given us what is perhaps the most careful and penetrating analysis of the concept of natural selection as it affects the process of evolution".
Parsimony
Sober's first publication on parsimony was his 1975 book, Simplicity. In it, he argued that the simplicity of a hypothesis should be understood in terms of a concept of question-relative informativeness. Sober abandoned this theory in the 1980s when he started to think about the concept of cladistic parsimony used in evolutionary biology. This led him to think of parsimony in terms of the concept of likelihood, an idea he developed in his 1988 book Reconstructing the Past -- Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference. In the 1990s he started to think about the role of parsimony in model selection theory—for example, in the Akaike Information Criterion. He published a series of articles in this area with Malcolm Forster, the first of which was their 1994 paper "How to Tell When Simpler, More Unified, or Less Ad Hoc Theories Will Provide More Accurate Predictions." His most recent publication on parsimony, his 2015 book Ockham's Razors -- A User's Manual, describes both the likelihood framework and the model selection frameworks as two viable "parsimony paradigms."