Credence for Epistemic Discourse

Many recent theories of epistemic discourse exploit an informational notion of consequence, i.e. a notion that defines entailment as preservation of support by an information state. This paper investigates how informational consequence fits with probabilistic reasoning. I raise two problems. First, all informational inferences that are not also classical inferences are, intuitively, probabilistically invalid. Second, all these inferences can be exploited, in a systematic way, to generate triviality results. The informational theorist is left with two options, both of them radical: they can either deny that epistemic modal claims have probability at all, or they can move to a nonstandard probability theory

Nonfactual Know-How and the Boundaries of Semantics

Know-how and expressivism are usually regarded as disjoint topics, belonging to distant areas of philosophy. This paper argues that, despite obvious differences, the two debates have important similarities. In particular, semantic and conceptual tools developed by expressivists can be exported to the know-how debate. On the one hand, some of the expressivists' semantic resources can be used to deflect Stanley and Williamson's influential argument for factualism about know-how: the claim that knowing how to do something consists in knowing a fact. On the other, expressivism provides the resources to formulate a nonfactualist account of know-how. On this account, know-how has a kind of nonpropositional content and plays the role of guiding performance of action, rather than recording information from the environment

From genoese asentistas to impoverished nobles. Strata, marquises of Robledo de Chavela

Cualquier trabajo que tenga como base aspectos económicos o financieros de la España del siglo XVII, particularmente en su primera mitad, presenta a Carlos Strata como una de las figuras protagonistas. No obstante, mientras que sobre sus negocios o sus contribuciones a la corona se conoce casi todo, apenas se ha dicho nada de las generaciones que le sucedieron. En las páginas que siguen se presenta una reconstrucción de la historia de esta familia, que, en poco más de un siglo (1640-1760), pasó de la abundancia a “la más extrema necesidad”, de residir en Madrid, centro neurálgico de poder e influencia, a la periferia. Su trayectoria, marcada por un claro declive, muestra las estrategias que cada generación, según sus propias circunstancias, utilizó para, si no invertir, frenar al menos dicha tendencia, tratando de evitar lo que a finalmente ocurrió: la subasta en pública almoneda de su título, señorío y enterramiento, esos mismos atributos que en su día determinaron su acceso a la cúpula social.Any work dealing with economic or financial aspects relative to the XVII century in Spain, particularly regarding its first-half, presents to Carlos Strata as one of the most representative figures. Whereas almost everything is known about his business or his contributions to the crown, very little has been said on his sequent generations. This paper presents a reconstruction of his family’s history, which in somewhat more than one century (1640-1760) passed form the abundance to the “most extreme need”, form living in Madrid, the centre of power and influence, to the periphery. The trajectory of this family, exhibiting a clear decline, shows the strategies that each generation, according to their own circumstances, developed in order to, if not reverse, at least slow down that trend, trying to avoid what finally occurred: the public auction of the titles, lordship and burial, those attributes that in the past determined their access to the social leadershi

Confidence Reports

We advocate and develop a states-based semantics for both nominal and adjectival confidence reports, as in "Ann is confident/has confidence that it's raining", and their comparatives "Ann is more confident/has more confidence that it's raining than that it's snowing". Other examples of adjectives that can report confidence include "sure" and "certain". Our account adapts Wellwood's account of adjectival comparatives in which the adjectives denote properties of states, and measure functions are introduced compositionally. We further explore the prospects of applying these tools to the semantics of probability operators. We emphasize three desirable and novel features of our semantics: (i) probability claims only exploit qualitative resources unless there is explicit compositional pressure for quantitative resources; (ii) the semantics applies to both probabilistic adjectives (e.g., "likely") and probabilistic nouns (e.g., "probability"); (iii) the semantics can be combined with an account of belief reports that allows thinkers to have incoherent probabilistic beliefs (e.g. thinking that A & B is more likely than A) even while validating the relevant purely probabilistic claims (e.g. validating the claim that A & B is never more likely than A). Finally, we explore the interaction between confidence-reporting discourse (e.g., "I am confident that...") and belief-reports about probabilistic discourse (e.g.,"I think it's likely that..")

Síntesis de gamma-aminoácidos funcionalizados con polietilenglicoles

Traballo Fin de Grao en Química. Curso 2013-2014Cyclicpeptides formed by stereo-alternating amino acids subunits are macromolecules with the ability of adopting a planar conformation and self-stack on top of each other through the formation of hydrogen bonds to give nanotubes. The peptide nanotubes external surface can be modulated by the side chain of the amino acids used in the cyclic peptides. The incorporation of γ-amino acids in the peptide skeleton provides to the cyclic peptides new properties like the inner modulation for the synthesis of ion selective channels. This functionalizacion in contrast with other systems i.e. carbon nanotubes, is at the moment impossible to other nanotube forming strategies. Hence, the first synthetic steps towards the construction of a new nanotube based on α,γ-cyclicpeptides is the γ-amino acid synthesis. In this work, we synthesized the γ-amino acid called Acp (cis-3-aminecyclicpentanecarboxylic acid) from the Vince´s lactame and then it was modified at the amino group by a covalent coupling with a polietelenglycol group (PEG). These γ-amino acids with polietelenglycol groups could create hidrophylic channel useful to carry out molecular or ion transport in cell membranes like specific proteins

Probability for epistemic modalities

This paper develops an information-sensitive theory of the semantics and probability of conditionals and statements involving epistemic modals. The theory validates a number of principles linking probability and modality, including the principle that the probability of a conditional If A, then C equals the probability of C, updated with A. The theory avoids so-called triviality results, which are standardly taken to show that principles of this sort cannot be validated. To achieve this, we deny that rational agents update their credences via conditionalization. We offer a new rule of update, Hyperconditionalization, which agrees with Conditionalization whenever nonmodal statements are at stake but differs for modal and conditional sentences

Nonboolean Conditionals

On standard analyses, indicative conditionals behave in a Boolean fashion when interacting with and and or. We test this prediction by investigating probability judgments about sentences of the form "If A, then B {and, or} if C, then D". Our findings are incompatible with a Boolean picture. This is challenging for standard analyses of ICs, as well as for several nonclassical analyses. Some trivalent theories, conversely, may account for the data