Elliott Sober

Elliott R. Sober (born 6 June 1948) is Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor Emeritus 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.

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.

And Sober has worked with the biologist Steven Orzack, clarifying and critiquing Richard Levins'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.

Sober joined the Wisconsin faculty in 1974, and retired in 2023.

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.

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".

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 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.

Sober has worked on clarifying and defending the idea of group selection; 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.

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.

He was also a tenured professor of philosophy at Stanford University 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 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.

Since 2013, Sober has been listed on the Advisory Council of the National Center for Science Education.

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 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."