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Mandarin Chinese is typologically unusual among the world's languages in having flexible word order despite a near absence of inflectional morphology. These features of Mandarin challenge conventional linguistic notions such as subject and object and the divide between syntax and semantics. In the present study, we tested monolingual processing of argument structure in Mandarin verb-final sentences, where word order alone is not a reliable cue. We collected participants' responses to a forced agent-assignment task while measuring their electroencephalography data to capture real-time processing throughout each sentence. We found that sentence interpretation was not informed by word order in the absence of other cues, and while the coverbs BA and BEI were strong signals for agent selection, comprehension was a result of multiple cues. These results challenge previous reports of a linear ranking of cue strength. Event-related potentials showed that BA and BEI impacted participants' processing even before the verb was read and that role reversal anomalies elicited an N400 effect without a subsequent semantic P600. This study demonstrates that Mandarin sentence comprehension requires online interaction among cues in a language-specific manner, consistent with models that predict crosslinguistic differences in core sentence processing mechanisms.

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To investigate the reliability of L2 listening tests and explore potential factors affecting the reliability, a reliability generalization (RG) meta-analysis was conducted in the present study. A total number of 122 alpha coefficients of L2 listening tests from 92 published articles were collected and submitted to a linear mixed effects RG analysis. The papers were coded based on a coding scheme consisting of 16 variables classified into three categories: study features, test features, and statistical results. The results showed an average reliability of 0.818 (95% CI: 0.803 to 0.833), with 40% of reliability estimates falling below the lower bound of CI. The presence of publication bias and heterogeneity was found in the reliability of L2 listening tests, indicating that low reliability coefficients were likely omitted from some published studies. In addition, two factors predicting the reliability of L2 listening tests were the number of items and test type (standardized and researcher- or teacher-designed tests). The study also found that reliability is not a moderator of the relationship between L2 listening scores and theoretically relevant constructs. Reliability induction was identified in reporting the reliability of L2 listening tests, too. Implications for researchers and teachers are discussed.

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To explore Swedish physicians' arguments and values for and against physician-assisted suicide (PAS) extracted from the free-text comments in a postal survey. A random selection of approximately 240 physicians from each of the following specialties: general practice, geriatrics, internal medicine, oncology, surgery and psychiatry. All 123 palliative care physicians in Sweden. A qualitative content analysis of free-text comments in a postal questionnaire commissioned by the Swedish Medical Society in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The total response rate was 59.2%. Of the 933 respondents, 1107 comments were provided. The free-text comments entailed both normative and factual arguments for and against PAS. The analysis resulted in two main categories: (1) "Safe implementation of PAS is unachievable" (with subcategories "Criteria of PAS difficult to fulfil" and "PAS puts societal norms and values at risk") and (2) "The role of PAS in healthcare" (with subcategories "No medical need for PAS", "PAS is not a task for physicians", "No ethical difference to other end-of-life decisions" and "PAS is in the patient's best interest"). The respondents brought up well-known arguments from academic and public debate on the subject. Comments from physicians against PAS were more often emotionally charged and used devices like dysphemisms and slippery-slope arguments.

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Our best current science seems to suggest the laws of physics and the initial conditions of our universe are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. A significant number of scientists and philosophers believe that the fine-tuning is evidence for the multiverse hypothesis. This paper will focus on a much-discussed objection to the inference from the fine-tuning to the multiverse: the charge that this line of reasoning commits the inverse gambler's fallacy. Despite the existence of a literature going back decades, this philosophical debate has made little contact with scientific discussion of fine-tuning and the multiverse, which mainly revolves around a specific form of the multiverse hypothesis rooted in eternal inflation combined with string theory. Because of this, potentially important implications from science to philosophy, and vice versa, have been left underexplored. In this paper, I will take a first step at joining up these two discussions, by arguing that attention to the eternal inflation + string theory conception of the multiverse supports the inverse gambler's fallacy charge. It does this by supporting the idea that our universe is contingently fine-tuned, thus addressing the concern that proponents of the inverse gambler's fallacy charge have assumed this without argument.

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This paper addresses the issue of the import of convergence arguments in theory assessment. A first part is devoted to making the point of the different types of strategies based on convergence, providing new distinctions with respect to the existing literature. Specific attention is devoted to robustness vs consilience arguments and one representative example for each category is then discussed in some detail. These are: (a) Perrin's famous robustness argument on behalf of the atomic hypothesis on the grounds of the concordance of thirteen different procedures to the same result for the Avogadro number; (b) the consilience argument motivating the trust in the viability of the extra-dimension conjecture in the context of early string theory. These two cases are expressly chosen in order to highlight possible differences, also including whether the convergence obtains in terms of empirical or theoretical procedures. Notwithstanding these various differences, in both cases the evaluation of the assessment strategy similarly depends, in a significant way, on how the convergence argument is interpreted, as shown in the final part of the paper.

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We study a discrete-time Markov process on triangular arrays of matrices of size d≥1, driven by inverse Wishart random matrices. The components of the right edge evolve as multiplicative random walks on positive definite matrices with one-sided interactions and can be viewed as a d-dimensional generalisation of log-gamma polymer partition functions. We establish intertwining relations to prove that, for suitable initial configurations of the triangular process, the bottom edge has an autonomous Markovian evolution with an explicit transition kernel. We then show that, for a special singular initial configuration, the fixed-time law of the bottom edge is a matrix Whittaker measure, which we define. To achieve this, we perform a Laplace approximation that requires solving a constrained minimisation problem for certain energy functions of matrix arguments on directed graphs.

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We propose a model of moral policy opinion formation that integrates both ideology and cognitive ability. The link from people's ideology to their opinions is assumed to go via a semantic processing of moral arguments that relies on the individual's cognitive ability. An implication of this model is that the relative quality of arguments that justify supporting vs. opposing a moral policy-the policy's "argument advantage"-is key to how opinions will be distributed in the population and develop over time. To test this implication, we combine polling data with measures of the argument advantage for 35 moral policies. Consistent with the opinion formation model, the argument advantage of a moral policy accounts for how public opinion moves over time, and how support for the policy ideologies varies across different ideological groups and levels of cognitive ability, including a strong interaction between ideology and cognitive ability.

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Science promises benefits, some true and some illusory. Consider a scientific agnostic who thinks that to reap the true benefits of a scientific theory he does not have to believe in its theoretical posits. Instead, it is enough if he believes that the theory successfully predicts the behavior of the observables, as ultimately only such predictions matter. Say, however, that given the results of her thorough research, a psychologist proposes a theory describing a psychological mechanism underlying a certain class of normative judgments. Moreover, the mechanism seems unfit for the task-once you see the details of the mechanism, you will realize that this is not the way they should be produced. Therefore, if the psychologist is right, it seems that these normative judgments should not inform one's normative theorizing or one's actions (Greene, 2008; Greene, 2014; Kelly, 2014). And say that the agnostic accepts the psychologist's theory, trusting that it makes correct predictions about, for example, fMRI images and subjects' reaction times, as they are observable. He also thinks that if the psychologist's description of the mechanism is correct, the judgments should not be trusted. Yet, since the mechanism posited by the theory is not observable, the agnostic is agnostic about it. He thus cannot be convinced that these judgments are produced in a flawed way and, consequently, has no reason to distrust them. Scientific agnosticism comes, therefore, at the cost of dismissing normative arguments that invoke unobservable posits of psychological models. The ability to make such arguments is a true (rather than illusory) benefit of science, despite the agnostic's promise that his philosophical theory leaves intact benefits that genuinely matter.

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Introduction: Psycholinguistic research remains puzzled about the circumstances under which syntactically transformed idioms keep their figurative meaning. There is an abundance of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies that have examined which factors may determine why some idioms are more syntactically fixed than others, including transparency, compositionality, and syntactic frozenness; however, they have returned inconclusive, sometimes even conflicting, results. This is the first study to examine argument structure (i.e., the number of arguments a verb takes) and argument adjacency (i.e., the position of the critical arguments relative to the verb) and their effects on the processing of idiomatic and literal sentences in German. Our results suggest that neither the traditional models of idiom processing (according to which idioms are stored as fixed entries) nor more recent hybrid theories (which concede some compositional handling in addition to a fixed entry) adequately account for the effects of argument structure or argument adjacency. Therefore, this study challenges existing models of idiom processing. Methods: In two sentence-completion experiments, participants listened to idiomatic and literal sentences in both active and passive voice without the sentence-final verb. They indicated which of three visually-presented verbs best completed the sentence. We manipulated the factor argument structure within experiments and argument adjacency across experiments. In Experiment 1, passivized three-argument sentences had the critical argument adjacent to the verb while two-argument sentences had the critical argument non-adjacent to the verb, and vice versa in Experiment 2. Results: In both experiments, voice interacted with argument structure. Active sentences-both literal and idiomatic-showed equivalent processing of two- and three-argument sentences. However, passive sentences returned contrasting effects. In Experiment 1, three-argument sentences were processed faster than two-argument sentences and vice versa in Experiment 2. This pattern corresponds to faster processing when critical arguments are adjacent than non-adjacent. Discussion: The results point to the dominant role of argument adjacency over the number of arguments in the processing of syntactically transformed sentences. Regarding idiom processing, we conclude that the adjacency of the verb to its critical arguments determines whether passivized idioms keep their figurative meaning and present the implications of this finding for relevant models of idiom processing.

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Delphi methods are mostly used in the health sciences to reach agreement among experts on unclear issues. Generally, consensus is reached after several rounds of Delphi using standardized items. Additional open-ended questions offer respondents the opportunity to provide reasons for judgments. Although these free-text responses contribute substantially to the steering and result generation of the Delphi process, so far no analytical strategy has been established which takes into account the context and methodological principles of the Delphi procedure. Moreover, in already published Delphi studies the analysis of qualitative data is often not sufficiently disclosed.•We provide an overview of analytical strategies for free-text responses. We critically reflect on them with regard to their use and suitability in the context of Delphi procedures.•Following established qualitative methods of qualitative content analysis according to Mayring and thematic analysis according to Braun & Clarke, we developed the Argument-based QUalitative Analysis strategy (AQUA) for Delphi studies in the health sciences and presented it using a concrete project example.•This newly developed strategy can significantly support the rule-governed and intersubjective evaluation of free-text responses in Delphi processes, the integration of the results into the feedback design, and thereby also the quality of the results.

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Background: Some meat eaters are faced with a dilemma: they like to eat meat, but they are also concerned about animal welfare, the environmental impact of meat production, and health risks associated with meat consumption. Aim We investigated the interrelationship between 'meat attachment' (people's affective connection towards meat) and the '4Ns' (four defence arguments omnivores use to justify their meat consumption: eating meat is normal, necessary, nice, and natural), two constructs often used by researchers to measure omnivores justifications for meat consumption. Second, we compared the predictive power of both constructs on omnivores' (willingness to reduce) meat consumption in a regression model that also included age, gender, educational level, financial status, and participants' beliefs concerning environmental, ethical and health issues of eating meat. Methods: In total 203 Belgian omnivores (47.4% men) completed an online questionnaire in February 2020. Their ages ranged from 18 to 55 (M = 23.57, SD = 4.64). Results: Results indicate that the correlations between the different dimensions of 'meat attachment' and the 4Ns are significantly positive (p < 0.001). A comparison of the predictive power of both constructs on omnivores' (willingness to reduce) meat consumption showed that the 'meat attachment' construct performs statistically better than the 4Ns construct. In addition, omnivores' beliefs concerning the ethical implications of eating meat are also an important predictor in their meat consumption, whereas environmental and health related aspects are not. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that national health campaigns warning about the health risks of excessive meat consumption might be less effective than health campaigns focussing on the ethical issues associated with meat eating.

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Vaccine hesitancy is a multi-faceted phenomenon, deeply rooted in cultural, socioeconomic and personal background. Communication is deemed fundamental in fighting vaccine hesitancy. Medical communication should be accessible, relying both on an emotional approach and accurate information. Trained professionals should curate communication with the public.

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Lobbying led by the tobacco industry and tobacconists is a barrier to reducing smoking prevalence in France. Here, we analyze the discourse of the tobacco industry and other key actors (public health agencies, politicians, etc.) in the French general-audience news media from 2000 to 2020 around tobacco tax increases, which is one of the most effective tobacco control measures, especially amongst youth. We queried Europresse (a European news media and specialized press database) using the keywords "increase", "price or taxes", and "tobacco or cigarettes", and found 5409 topic-relevant articles, from which we extracted 8015 arguments for or against the measure. In total,64.3% were against the measure (mostly on grounds of "ufueling the black market"), 32.1% were for the measure (mostly claiming it is "effective at reducing smoking prevalence"), and 1.8% proposed alternative measures. Tobacconists, the primary source of media content on the topic, led a discourse that was strongly opposed to tax increases. Public health agencies, which attracted only half as much media attention, were strongly supportive of the measure. Analysis of discourses relayed in the French general-audience press revealed overwhelming opposition to tobacco tax increases, and this discourse was widely advanced by tobacconists. The results were congruent with international literature that had highlighted a similar set of arguments to those found in the French general press that were broadcasted by the tobacco industry and its allies (tobacconists in France) in an effort to block this evidence-based public health measure.

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La maternidad subrogada ha estado presente en la vida reproductiva de miles de parejas que buscan, a través de este procedimiento, lograr el sueño de convertirse en padres/madres de una criatura que tenga su mismo origen biológico. Estas parejas no pueden concebir debido a una imposibilidad física para gestar o por tratarse de parejas del mismo sexo, siendo ésta la única forma de convertirse en padres/madres biológicos. Sin embargo, en la actualidad, cada vez son más los casos que llegan a diversos tribunales con disputas por el reconocimiento de la filiación y la nacionalidad, así como problemas por la forma en que el poder legislativo ha regulado estos procedimientos. A través de estas líneas se expondrá lo que ha resuelto la Suprema Corte de Justicia de México sobre este tema, ya que los estados de Tabasco y Sinaloa han regulado el uso de la maternidad subrogada, pero en el año 2016 se solicitó la revisión de la Suprema Corte de la norma establecida en Tabasco por considerarla inconstitucional.(AU)

La maternitat subrogada ha estat present en la vida reproductiva de milers de parelles que busquen, a través d'aquest procediment, aconseguir el somni de convertir-se en pares/mares d'una criatura que tingui el seu mateix origen biològic. Aquestes parellesno poden concebre a causa d'una impossibilitat física per a gestar o per tractar-se de parelles del mateix sexe, sent aquesta l'única manera de convertir-se en pares/mares biològics. No obstant això, en l'actualitat, cada vegada són més els casos que arriben a diversos tribunals amb disputes pel reconeixement de la filiació i la nacionalitat, així com problemes per la forma en què el poder legislatiu ha regulat aquests procediments. A través d'aquestes línies s'exposarà el que ha resolt la Suprema Cort de Justícia de Mèxic sobre aquest tema, ja que, els estats de Tabasco i Sinaloa han regulat l'ús de la maternitat subrogada, però l'any 2016 es va sol·licitar la revisió de la Suprema Cort de la norma establerta en Tabasco per considerar-la inconstitucional.(AU)

Surrogate motherhood has been present in the reproductive life of thousands of couples who seek, through this procedure, to accomplish the dream of becoming parents of a child with the same biological origin. These couples face an inability to conceive within the couple due to a physical impossibility to gestate or because they are same-sex couples, this being the only way to become biological parents. However, nowadays, more and more cases are coming to court with disputes over filiation and nationality, as well as legal disputes about the way in which the legislature has regulated these procedures. This article will explain what the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice has ruled on the subject, since the states of Tabasco and Sinaloa have regulated the use of surrogacy, but in 2016 the Supreme Court was asked to review the regulation established in Tabasco as it was considered unconstitutional.(AU)

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This paper studies a system of nonlinear fractional differential equations (FDEs) with deviated arguments. Many linear and nonlinear problems are faced in the real-life. Generally, linear problems are solved quickly, but some difficulties appear while solving nonlinear problems. Our purpose is to approximate those solutions numerically via the Adomian decomposition method (ADM). Here, our main goal is to apply the ADM to solve higher-order nonlinear system of FDEs with deviated arguments. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the solution using Banach contraction principle. Moreover, we plot the figures of ADM solutions using MATLAB.

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BACKGROUND: In the past decade, most people who buy and own guns are doing so for self-defense. Yet little is known about actual defensive gun use in the USA. METHODS: To discover what information newspaper articles and local news reports might add, we read the news reports of defensive use incidents assembled by the Gun Violence Archive. We examined a sample of more than a quarter of the incidents from 2019, the last year before the pandemic. We examined all cases from four months-January, April, July, and October. We created a typology of defensive gun use incidents. RESULTS: Of 418 incidents, in about half, the perpetrator was armed with a firearm. In almost 90% of the cases, the victim fired their firearm-315 perpetrators were shot and about half of them died. The average number of perpetrators shot per incident was 0.75; the average number of victims shot was 0.25. We estimate that in 2019 fewer than 600 potential perpetrators were killed in defensive gun use incidents that made the news. Among the thirteen categories of shooting were drug-related (4% of incidents), gang-like combat (6%), romantic partner disputes (11%), escalating arguments (13%), store robberies (9%), street robberies (5%), unoccupied vehicle theft (5%), unarmed burglaries (7%), home invasions (20%), and miscellaneous (6%). CONCLUSION: We believe the Gun Violence Archive dataset includes the large majority of news reports of defensive gun use-and especially those in which the perpetrator is shot and dies. Some of the strengths of using news reports as a data source are that we can be certain that the incident occurred, and the reports provide us with a story behind the incident, one usually vetted in part by the police with occasional input from the victims, perpetrator, family, witnesses, or neighbors. Defensive gun use situations are quite diverse, and among the various categories of defensive gun use, a higher percentage of incidents in some of the categories seemed far less likely to be socially beneficial (e.g., drug-related, gang-like, escalating arguments) than in others (e.g., home invasions).

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In this paper, I introduce a new challenge to moral realism: the skeptical argument from moral underdetermination. The challenge arises as a consequence of two recent projects in normative ethics. Both Parfit (On what matters, vol 1. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011a) and a group called consequentializers have independently claimed that the main traditions of normative theories can agree on the set of correct particular deontic verdicts. Nonetheless, as Dietrich and List (Philos Rev 126(4):421-479, 2017) and myself (Baumann in J Ethics Soc Philos 13(3):191-221, 2018; Australas J Philos 97(3):511-527, 2019; Ethical Theory Moral Pract 24(4):999-1018, 2021a) have argued, the traditions still disagree about why these are the correct verdicts. This means that we can understand the situation in terms of an idea from the philosophy of science, the underdetermination of theory by the evidence. Yet underdetermination figures in one of the most important skeptical challenges to scientific realism. I show how an analogous skeptical argument can be construed for the moral realm. I propose a standard form for that argument. I then defend it against three possible objections, arguing that it is at least as plausible as, if not more plausible than, its counterpart in the philosophy of science.

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Opponents of abortion are commonly said to be inconsistent in their beliefs or actions, and to fail in their obligations to prevent the deaths of embryos and fetuses from causes other than induced abortion. We have argued that these 'inconsistency arguments' conform to a pattern which is susceptible to a number of objections, and that consequently they fail en masse. In response, Joshua Shaw argues that we misrepresent inconsistency arguments, and that we underestimate the extent to which our opponents have anticipated and addressed counterarguments. In this essay we draw on aspects of Shaw's alternative formulation of inconsistency arguments to present an improved inconsistency argument structure. While we agree with Shaw that inconsistency arguments must each be examined on their merits, we reject Shaw's assertion that our objections are dependent on misrepresentations. Our initial objections remain largely successful, therefore, in dealing with the inconsistency arguments of which we are aware.

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INTRODUCTION: While debates on e-cigarettes are mainly conducted in scientific fora, media are the most accessible information source for the public, shaping their perceptions of health issues. This study is the first to examine e-cigarette related topics with conflicting arguments presented in Chinese newspapers. METHODS: The Chinese terms for 'e-cigarettes' were searched in a widely used Chinese news database Wisenews. Content analysis of the full text of 639 news articles was conducted to identify topics with conflicting arguments and examine whether the dominant argument in each topic changed across four time periods from 2004 to 2019. RESULTS: Twelve e-cigarette related topics with conflicting arguments were identified. The most frequently reported topic was health impact of e-cigarettes, followed by impact of secondhand aerosol exposure, smoking cessation, relative health impact of e-cigarettes compared to cigarettes, and e-cigarette policies outside China. At the same time, the price was the least frequently reported topic. Overall, negative arguments outnumbered positive arguments in the study period. The dominant arguments within many topics changed across time periods; however, within the topics of relative health impact of e-cigarettes compared to cigarettes, taste/flavor, and economic prospects of the industry, positive arguments were more frequently reported in almost all periods. Within the topics of addiction, policies in China, and policies outside China, negative arguments were more frequently reported in virtually all periods. CONCLUSIONS: Though overall the dominant argument about e-cigarettes and health was 'e-cigarettes are harmful', in the early time periods, e-cigarettes were reported as 'harmless' or even 'healthy'. As China began to regulate e-cigarettes, the reporting on e-cigarettes more frequently included the 'e-cigarettes are harmful' argument. The consistent, more frequent reporting of 'good e-cigarette taste/flavor' has the potential to attract young people to e-cigarette products. The increased reporting on policies unfavorable to e-cigarettes aligned with the growing number of regulations restricting e-cigarettes.

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The aim of this paper is to analyse the legal record on civil litigation from mid-March 2020 to mid-July 2021 and examine COVID-19 pandemic-related arguments in a sample of litigated cases heard in Polish courts, more precisely 41 cases. In an attempt to establish the number and types of court cases in which such arguments have been raised, the population of individual case records was accessed electronically from the Ordinary Courts Judgments Portal (Pol. Portal Orzeczen Sadów Powszechnych). The analysed research material consists of texts of written justifications published along with rulings of courts of the first instance in the Portal, except for texts regarding criminal cases and widely understood labour cases. This paper refers to certain theoretical aspects of argument and argumentation. Then, it sheds light on the use of COVID-19 pandemic-related arguments by the parties involved in litigation-as reported by the courts in written justifications-considering, amongst others, whether those arguments were found convincing by the courts. Based on a survey of relevant cases, an attempt was made to identify categories of COVID-19 pandemic-related arguments of the parties involved in litigation, raised in their legal submissions. Also a look into the tendencies in this regard was taken to see whether any patterns emerge and it is possible (or not) to discern different trends in the analysed phenomena. The point of the analysis in this article is both descriptive and normative.