Elliott R. Sober (born 6 June 1948) is an American philosopher. He is noted for his work in
philosophy of biology
The philosophy of biology is a subfield of philosophy of science, which deals with epistemology, epistemological, metaphysics, metaphysical, and ethics, ethical issues in the biological and biomedical sciences. Although philosophers of science and ...
and general
philosophy of science
Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. Amongst its central questions are the difference between science and non-science, the reliability of scientific theories, ...
. Sober is
Hans Reichenbach
Hans Reichenbach (; ; September 26, 1891 – April 9, 1953) was a leading philosopher of science, educator, and proponent of logical empiricism. He was influential in the areas of science, education, and of logical empiricism. He founded the ''G ...
Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison (University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, UW, UW–Madison, or simply Madison) is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. It was founded in 1848 when Wisconsin achieved st ...
.
Education and career
Sober earned his
Ph.D. in philosophy from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
under the supervision of
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (; July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, computer scientist, and figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He contributed to the studies of philosophy of ...
, after doing graduate work at
Cambridge University
The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...
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 joined the Wisconsin faculty in 1974, and retired in 2023. He was also a tenured professor of philosophy at
Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
in 2003-04, before returning to Wisconsin. He will be a visiting professor at Stanford for 2023-2026.
Sober has served as the president of both the Central Division of the
American Philosophical Association
The American Philosophical Association (APA) is the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States. Founded in 1900, its mission is to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarl ...
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
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
and has been a regular visiting professor at the
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), established in 1895, is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the University of London. The school specialises in the social sciences. Founded ...
.
Since 2013, Sober has been listed on the Advisory Council of the
National Center for Science Education.
Philosophical work
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
Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins".#Numbers 2006, Numbers 2006, p. 373; " Dcaptured headlines for it ...
. 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 ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') is a freely available online philosophy resource published and maintained by Stanford University, encompassing both an online encyclopedia of philosophy and peer-reviewed original publication ...
, "''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".
[Mayr, Ernst. ''Paleobiology'', Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring, 1986), pp. 233–239]
Sober has worked on clarifying and defending the idea of
group selection
Group selection is a proposed mechanism of evolution in which natural selection acts at the level of the group, instead of at the level of the individual or gene.
Early authors such as V. C. Wynne-Edwards and Konrad Lorenz argued that the beha ...
; see, for example, his book with
David Sloan Wilson, ''Unto Others – the Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior'' (1998). Sober also has worked with the biologist Mike Steel, exploring conceptual questions about the idea of
common ancestry. And Sober has worked with the biologist Steven Orzack, clarifying and critiquing
Richard Levins
Richard Levins (June 1, 1930 – January 19, 2016) was a Marxist biologist, a population geneticist, biomathematician, mathematical ecologist, and philosopher of science who researched genetic diversity, diversity in human populations. Until his ...
's 1966 paper "The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology;" they also have worked together on the concept of
adaptationism, and have devised a methodology for testing the hypothesis that two species exhibit a trait because they have a common ancestor, and not because natural selection caused each to evolve the trait.
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." In 2002 he published a new article "Instrumentalism, Parsimony, and the Akaike Framework," explaining how Akaike’s criterion and framework and the ideas behind them connect to the epistemology of instrumentalism. 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."
Books
* ''Simplicity'', Oxford University Press, 1975.
* (edited) ''Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology: An Anthology'', Bradford/MIT Press, 1984; 2nd edition 1993.
* ''The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus'', Bradford/MIT Press, 1984; 2nd edition, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
* ''Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference'', Bradford/MIT Press, 1988; Japanese edition, Souju Publishers, Tokyo, 1996.
* ''Core Questions in Philosophy – A Text with Readings'', Macmillan 1990; Prentice Hall 2nd edition 1995; Pearson Publishers 3rd edition 2000; 4th edition 2005; 5th edition 2009, 6th edition 2013; Routledge 7th edition 2019.
* ''Philosophy of Biology'', Westview Press (in UK: Oxford University Press), 1993; 2nd edition, 1999; Spanish edition, Alianza, 1996; Chinese edition, 2000; Korean edition, Chul Hak Kwa Hyun Sil Sa Publishing Co., 2004.
* (with Erik Wright and Andrew Levine) ''Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of History'', Verso Press, 1992; Portuguese edition, 1993.
* ''From a Biological Point of View: Essays in Evolutionary Philosophy'', Cambridge University Press, 1994.
* (with David Sloan Wilson) ''Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior'', Harvard University Press, 1998; Spanish edition, Siglo Veintiouno de España Editores, 2000.
* (edited with Steven Orzack) ''Adaptationism and Optimality'', Cambridge University Press, 2001.
* ''Evidence and Evolution'', Cambridge University Press, 2008.
* ''Did Darwin Write the'' Origin ''Backwards'', Prometheus Books, 2011.
* ''Ockham’s Razors – A User’s Manual'', Cambridge University Press, 2015.
* ''The Design Argument'', Cambridge University Press, 2018.
* ''The Philosophy of Evolutionary Theory'', Cambridge University Press, 2024
Selected articles and book chapters
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References
External links
Elliott Sober's website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sober, Elliot
1948 births
Living people
Harvard University alumni
20th-century American philosophers
21st-century American philosophers
Academics of the London School of Economics
Presidents of the American Philosophical Association
Analytic philosophers
Charles Darwin biographers
American critics of creationism
Philosophers of biology
American philosophers of science
University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty
Lakatos Award winners