Manuel Garcia

Richard Moran has argued, convincingly, in favour of the idea that there must be more than one path to access our own mental contents. The existence of those routes, one first-personal—through avowal—the other third-personal—no different to the one used to ascribe mental states to other people and to interpret their actions—is intimately connected to our capacity to respond to norms. Moran’s account allows for conflicts between first personal and third personal authorities over my own beliefs; this enable some instances of Moore-paradoxical cases to be meaningful. In this paper we reflect on the consequences of this view for the acquisition of beliefs, and argue that, as in the moral case, excessive concentration on a thirdpersonal understanding of thought undermines the very idea of being directed to the world and of being capable to fully own our own beliefs. We suggest that maybe too much attention to epistemic virtues or tojustification is misdirected and could produce beliefs that are themself not first-personal enough.

De re or singular thoughts are, intuitively, those essentially or constitutively about a particular object or objects; any thought about different objects would be a different thought. How should a philosophical articulation or thematization of their nature look like? In spite of extended discussion of the issue since it was brought to the attention of the philosophical community in the late fifties by Quine (1956), we are far from having a plausible response. This is glaringly revealed by the contrasting recent takes on the issue by writers such as Soames (2005) – who adopts the view by Donnellan (1979) to be outlined presently – and Jeshion (2001), otherwise sharing a similar direct-reference approach to the prototypical expression of those contents. Discussing the matter in connection with the status of the Kripkean category of the contingent a priori in the just mentioned article, Donnellan (1979) argued that what can be properly classified as knowable a priori about utterances like those involving ‘one meter’ or ‘Neptune’ famously proposed by Kripke (1980) cannot be the very same singular content that is contingent; he distinguished to that end between knowing a true proposition expressed by an utterance, and knowing that an utterance expresses a true proposition. (Thus, for instance, if, while listening to an utterance in a language that I do not know, I am told by a reliable person who knows the language and whom I trust that the utterance is true, I come thereby to know that the sentence expresses a truth, without knowing the truth that it expresses.) Evans (1979) replied that, for a very specific sort of cases involving “descriptive names”, a related proto-two-dimensionalist account should be preferred, on which it is not the singular contingent content, but rather a general descriptive one which is knowable a priori. In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion (2000, 2001) has recently attacked Donnellan's proposal, arguing in favour of the most straightforward interpretation of Kripke's claim: in the relevant cases, the very same singular content can be both contingent and knowable a priori. In this paper, I will appeal to a generalized version of two-dimensional semantics to advance an account of the Kripkean cases along the lines of Evans's, and I will argue that Jeshion's compelling arguments against Donnellan's view do not apply to this version.

Propuesta de un nuevo y complementario enfoque —el traductológico— para el estudio de los romanceamientos granadinos considerados en cuanto que testimonios únicos para la historia de la traducción del árabe al español y la historia del arabismo en España. Dicho enfoque se lleva aquí a la práctica ilustrado con dos romanceamientos inéditos llevados a cabo en 1517 por Bemardino Xarafí, escribano público y romanceador de la ciudad de Granada y su Reino. La edición de los mismos se acompaña de un amplio estudio traductológico, una panorámica general sobre los Xarafí y otros romanceadores granadinos del primer tercio del XVI y un análisis descriptivo comparado con otros romanceamientos del siglo XVI y con los procedimientos de traducción actualmente aceptados en la traducción jurada del árabe al español.

Este artículo estudia las diferencias entre el juicio de los periodistas culturales y el gusto de los lectores, aplicando un análisis de contenidos a los “libros del año” recomendados por los principales suplementos españoles (‘ABC Cultural’, ‘Babelia’, ‘Cultura|s’ y ‘El Cultural’) entre 2010 y 2020 (n=1.133), y cotejando estos listados con las valoraciones de los usuarios de ‘Goodreads’. Los libros seleccionados reciben una puntuación media discreta (7,3), con apenas un 0,2% de títulos considerables “sobresalientes”, lo que evidencia la distancia existente (aunque decreciente) con los críticos, sobre todo al cruzar con las variables de nacionalidad y género del autor.

The paper discusses four main views on the relation between language and reasons. Two of them contend that there is no significant relation, on different bases; a third contends that linguistic features can only be clarified by relating them to motivating reasons, and the fourth makes a similar claim but with respect to normative reasons instead. These approaches assume contrasting views on the nature of language. The first is a Platonist view on which the languages are abstract entities whose properties are independent of the psychology of rational beings. The second, promoted by Chomsky’s very successful research programs, sees languages as a feature of the nonconscious deep psychology of human beings, a genetically determined subpersonal part of the mind/brain. The third has two different guises: the Davidsonian interpretationist perspective, and Gricean proposals. The fourth holds that languages constitute speech-act potentials, on the assumption that speech-acts provide speakers with normative reasons.

The paper focuses on the modal argument that accounts of assertion in terms of constitutive norms are incompatible with conventionalism about assertion. The argument appeals to an alleged modal asymmetry: constitutive rules are essential to the acts they characterize, and therefore the obligations they impose necessarily apply to every instance; conventions are arbitrary, and thus can only contingently regulate the practices they establish. The paper argues that this line of reasoning fails to establish any modal asymmetry, by invoking the distinction between the non-discriminating existence across possible worlds of types (practices, institutions) defined by constitutive rules, and the discriminating existence of those among them that are actually in force. The necessity of practices defined by constitutive rules that the argument relies on concerns the former, while conventionalist claims concern the latter. The paper concludes suggesting considerations that are relevant to deciding whether assertion is in fact conventional.

Jeff King, Scott Soames, and Peter Hanks have advanced substantive theories of propositions, to deal with several issues they have raised in connection with a concern with a long pedigree in philosophy, the problem of the unity of propositions. The qualification ‘substantive’ is meant to contrast with ‘minimal’ or ‘deflationary’ – roughly, views that reject that propositions have a hidden nature, worth investigating. Substantive views, I’ll argue, create spurious problems by characterizing propositions in ways that make them unfit to perform their theoretical jobs. I will present in this light some critical points against recent substantivist proposals.

El presente artículo reconoce que las dos grandes metodologías de Foucault (la arqueología y la genealogía) surgieron en dos momentos diferentes de su enfoque metodológico, y argumenta que a partir de la década del setenta se desarrolla el concepto de dispositivo en el filósofo debido a una discontinuidad en su investigación. Se sostiene que este problema surgió a raíz de una serie de situaciones: el descubrimiento de un nuevo problema de investigación y su relación con la ocurrencia de una coyuntura sociopolítica especifica (fracaso de las movilizaciones sociales del mayo francés en 1968). Lo anterior llevó a Foucault a plantear la pregunta por ¿cómo se ejerce el poder y cuál es su relación con el saber?, en lugar del antiguo interrogante sobre ¿qué es el poder? Esta transformación de la pregunta resultó fundamental en Foucault, ya que le permite concluir que todo dispositivo presupone la existencia de un poder y que todo poder se ejerce mediante la utilización de un saber. El artículo se cierra con una referencia a Jurgen Habermas, autor que precisa la crisis que generó en Foucault el fracaso de las movilizaciones sociales ocurridas durante el denominado mayo francés. El presente trabajo se elaboró a partir de un método de investigación cualitativa y una técnica de rastreo bibliográfico.

Miranda Fricker distinguishes two senses in which testimonial injustice is epistemic. In the primary sense, it is epistemic because it harms the victim as a giver of knowledge. In the secondary sense, it is epistemic, more narrowly, because it harms the victim as a possessor of knowledge. Her characterization of testimonial injustice has raised the following objection: testimonial injustice is not always an epistemic injustice, in the narrow, secondary sense, as it does not always entail that the victim is harmed as a knowledge-possessor. By adopting a perspective based on Robert Brandom's normative expressivism, we respond to this objection by arguing that there is a close connection, conceptual and constitutive rather than merely causal, between the primary and the secondary epistemic harms of testimonial injustice, such that testimonial injustice always involves both kinds of epistemic harm. We do so by exploring the logic and functioning of belief and knowledge ascriptions in order to highlight three ways in which the secondary epistemic harm caused by testimonial injustice crystallizes: it undermines the epistemic agency of the victim, the epistemic friction necessary for knowledge, and the possibility of occupying particular epistemic nodes.

We intuitively make a distinction between _lying_ and _misleading_. On the explanation of this phenomenon favored here—the _adverbial_ account—the distinction tracks whether the content and its truth-committing force are literally conveyed. On an alternative _commitment_ account, the difference between lying and misleading is predicated instead on the strength of assertoric commitment. One lies when one presents with full assertoric commitment what one believes to be false; one merely misleads when one presents it without full assertoric commitment, by merely hinting or otherwise implying it. Now, as predicted by the well-supported assumption that we can also assert with pictures, the lying/misleading distinction appears to intuitively show up there too. Here I’ll explain how the debate confronting the two accounts plays out both in general and in that case, aiming to provide support for the adverbial account.

José Luis Moreno argumenta contra lo que considera una variedad de formas de fetichismo político. Lo que tienen en común es depositar una confianza excesiva o monolítica en algún mecanismo democrático en particular. Compartimos su motivación y en esta nota crítica intentamos llevar sus argumentos más lejos preguntándonos si diferentes tipos de conocimiento políticamente relevante pueden distinguirse, si en algunos contextos es necesario dejar las decisiones en manos de expertos y si la propuesta de Moreno cae en un nuevo tipo de fetichismo con respecto al sorteo como mecanismo capaz de eliminar injusticias sociales profundas.

Manuel García Carpintero defends a form of antirealism for the explicit talk and thought both about fictional entities and scientific models: a version of StephenYablo’s figuralist brand of factionalism. He argues that, in contrast with pretense-theoretic fictionalist proposals, on his view, utterances in those discourses are straightforward assertions with straightforward truth-conditions, involving a particular kind of metaphors or figurative manner. But given that the relevant metaphors are all but “dead”, this might suggest that the view is after all realist, committed to referents of some sort for singular terms in the relevant discourses. He revisits these issues from the perspective of the more recent work on them and applies his view to recent debates in semantics on the role and adequacy of supervaluationist models of indeterminacy.

Recommending the identity of bidders in public procurement auctions has a significant impact in many areas of public procurement, but it has not yet been studied in depth. A bidders recommender would be a very beneficial tool because a supplier can search appropriate tenders and, vice versa, a public procurement agency can discover automatically unknown companies which are suitable for its tender. This paper develops a pioneering algorithm to recommend potential bidders using a machine learning method, particularly a random forest classifier. The bidders recommender is described theoretically, so it can be implemented or adapted to any particular situation. It has been successfully validated with a case study: an actual Spanish tender dataset which has 102,087 tenders from 2014 to 2020 and a company dataset which has 1,353,213 Spanish companies. Quantitative, graphical, and statistical descriptions of both datasets are presented. The results of the case study were satisfactory: the winning bidding company is within the recommended companies group, from 24% to 38% of the tenders, according to different test conditions and scenarios.

Processing data streams arriving at high speed requires the development of models that can provide fast and accurate predictions. Although deep neural networks are the state-of-the-art for many machine learning tasks, their performance in real-time data streaming scenarios is a research area that has not yet been fully addressed. Nevertheless, much effort has been put into the adaption of complex deep learning (DL) models to streaming tasks by reducing the processing time. The design of the asynchronous dual-pipeline DL framework allows making predictions of incoming instances and updating the model simultaneously, using two separate layers. The aim of this work is to assess the performance of different types of DL architectures for data streaming classification using this framework. We evaluate models such as multi-layer perceptrons, recurrent, convolutional and temporal convolutional neural networks over several time series datasets that are simulated as streams at different speeds. In addition, we evaluate how the different architectures react to concept drifts typically found in evolving data streams. The obtained results indicate that convolutional architectures achieve a higher performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency, but are also the most sensitive to concept drifts.

In this paper I explore two possible ways of being quietist in philosophy and relate them to the work of Wittgenstein and McDowell. On the one hand, quietism could be understood as an imperative to remain quiet regarding what we value the most. The final aphorisms of the Tractatus seem to gesture in this direction. On the other hand, it could be seen as a refusal to produce philosophical theories regarding general and abstract issues such as meaning or thought. McDowell has recommended reading the Investigations under this light and has followed the advice in most of his work. I discuss some consequences of this approach to issues such as rule following, mental externalism and ethical particularlism and try to show that there is much exciting philosophical work to be done even after abandoning grand theoretical aspirations.

Assessing physical fitness has emerged as a proxy of the health status of children and adolescents and therefore as relevant from a public health point of view. DAFIS is a project included in Plan Galicia Saudable of the regional government of Galicia. DAFIS consists of an on-line software devoted to record the results of a standard physical fitness protocol carried out as a part of the physical education curriculum. The aims of this study were: to obtain normative values of physical fitness of the Galician school population evaluated in the DAFIS project, and to identify a reduced number of components and tests able to capture a significant amount of the variability in the physical fitness of children and adolescents. From an initial sample of 27784 records, 15287 cases were considered after filtering. Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape were used for obtaining percentile curves and tables for each sex. Furthermore, a principal components analysis was performed, selecting the number of components by applying the Kaiser’s rule and selecting a subset of variables considering the correlation between each variable and the components. Percentile curves and normative values are reported for each test and sex. Physical fitness was better in boys than in girls throughout age groups, except for flexibility that was consistently higher in girls. Two main components were detected throughout age groups: the first one representing body composition and partially cardiorespiratory fitness and the second one muscular fitness. For boys and girls, waist to height ratio had the highest correlations with the first component in four out of six age groups. The highest correlation with the second component, was most frequently observed for the handgrip test both in boys and girls. This study provides evidence about the utility of school community actions like DAFIS aimed to track the health-related fitness of children and adolescents. The results suggest that fat mass distribution and muscular performance concentrate a high proportion physical fitness variance.

The question of the limit and the difference between man and animal has become a philosophical issue of special relevance. Just look at its political, social, economic, etc. implications. For the first time man can direct his evolutionary process. From that context, the Heideggerian arguments on the subject are analyzed and discussed, taking their Derridian reading as a conductive thread. It reveals the contradiction between the thematic and operational need for a limit and the impossibility of founding it.

The object of this paper is to offer a conception of singular causality that lies between two main views in the literature, which I take to be paradigmatically represented by David Armstrong (1997) and by Michael Tooley (1987, 1990) respectively. Armstrong maintains that there is singular causation wherever there are singular facts that instantiate causal laws; these facts are otherwise independent regularities. Tooley maintains that singular causation is independent of causal laws together with any other non-causal fact. My own view is that Armstrong’s account is too weak to conform a singularist position, as in his view singular causal relations are finally dependent on universal causation. On the other hand, Tooley’s account is too strong to be causal, as causation dissolves into a purely external and mysterious connection that is not even Humean -not even regularities play a role in its establishment. I want to maintain that there exists a middle way that correctly characterizes the spirit of singular causation, and that can be stated by (CS): (CS) Singular causality is metaphysically independent of universal causality. Neither Tooley nor Armstrong would admit (CS) as an appropriate defining thesis for causal singularism. In what follows, I consider different causal situations existing in the literature, with the purpose of analysing singular causation, arguing against Tooley and Armstrong's views, and defending (CS) instead. If my reasons are accepted, Armstrong’s position, rather than being singular in spirit, results into a form of causal universalism. I will also reject Tooley’s singularism as an extreme counterintuitive form of hyperrealism. Some consequences for causation are immediate. In particular, that singular causal relations are tropes, i.e., individual relations.

Atrial fibrillation is the most common cardiac arrhythmia in clinical practice. It often starts with asymptomatic and short episodes, which are difficult to detect without the assistance of automatic monitoring tools. The vast majority of methods proposed for this purpose are based on quantifying the irregular ventricular response during the arrhythmia. However, although AF totally alters the atrial activity reflected on the electrocardiogram, replacing stable P-waves by chaotic and time-variant fibrillatory waves, this information has still not been explored for automated screening of AF. Hence, a pioneering AF detector based on quantifying the variability over time of the AA morphological pattern is here proposed. Results from two public reference databases have proven that the proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art algorithms, reporting accuracy higher than 90%. A less false positive rate in the presence of other arrhythmias different from AF was also noticed. Finally, the combination of this algorithm with the classical analysis of RR series variability also yielded a promising trade-off between AF accuracy and detection delay. Indeed, this combination provided similar accuracy than RR-based methods, but with a significantly shorter delay of 10 beats.