Annual Conference: Elliot Sober

Start date
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Location
Sala Jane Addams (4th floor). Philosophy Faculty UB Raval
Sober2

The Annual Conference of the CCiL joint program (MA and PhD) will be by Elliot Sober.

Elliott R. Sober is a Hans Reichenbach Professor and a 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.

The title of the conference is "Common-Cause Reasoning and Chimpanzee Mind Reading".

 

ABSTRACT

Tomasello and Povinelli each invoke parsimony considerations to decide whether chimpanzees are “mind-readers,” meaning that chimpanzees form beliefs about the mental states of others.  However, they draw opposite conclusions; Tomasello endorses the "mind-reading" hypothesis while Povinelli denies it.  Here I describe how hypotheses that postulate intervening variables can differ in their predictions from hypotheses that do not, and apply this idea to a mind-reading hypothesis that postulates an intervening variable that a behavior-reading hypothesis does not include.  I discuss this result in the light of ideas about model selection in statistics.