SORITES
An Electronic Quarterly of Analytical Philosophy
ISSN 1135-1349
No manuscript may be submitted if it is being considered for publication elsewhere.
Once accepted, papers may not be printed or displayed elsewhere or incorporated into a book, an anthology or any other publication of any sort, unless and until SORITES has accorded the author(s) permission to that effect -- which in normal cases will be done routinely, provided SORITES is duly acknowledged as the primary source. By submitting a paper, the author agrees to the points, terms and conditions contained in the Copyright Notice included in each issue of SORITES.
All submitted papers must be written in English. The author's local variety of English (including the spelling) will be respected -- be it Indian, Filipino, Australian, American, Western-African, British, Southern-African, Eastern-African, Jamaican, etc. All editorial material will be written in BBC English, which is the journal's «official» dialect.
There is no settled length limit for papers, but we expect our contributors to stand by usual editorial limitations. The editors may reject unreasonably long contributions.
We expect any submitted paper to be accompanied by a short abstract.
We welcome submissions of in-depth articles as well as discussion notes.
Ours is a journal granting a broad freedom of style to its contributors. Many ways of listing bibliographical items and referring to them seem to us acceptable, such as `[Moore, 1940]', or `[M:5]' or `[OQR]'. What alone we demand is clarity. (Thus, for instance, do not refer to `[SWT]' in the body of the article if no item in the bibliography collected at the end has a clear `[SWT]' in front of it, with the items sorted in the alphabetic order of the referring acronyms.) We prefer our contributors to refer to `Alvin Goldman' rather than `Goldman, A.', which is obviously ambiguous. We dislike implied anachronisms like [Hegel, 1989]' or `[Plato, 1861]' -- but you are entitled to ignore our advice.
How to submit?
(1) We will be thankful to all contributors who submit their papers in the form of [I.B.M.-PC] WordPerfect 5.1 files. There are several convertors which can be used to turn docs from other word processor formats into WP5.1 format. (Notice that with WP5.1 you can write not only almost all diacritically marked characters of any language which uses the Latin script, but moreover all of Greek and virtually all symbols of mathematical logic and set theory.)
(2.1) In case a contributor can neither use WP5.1 nor have their doc converted into WP5.1 format, they can send us their file in its original format (be it a different version of WordPerfect or another sort of word-processor, such as MS-Word, MS-Word for Windows, WordStar, AmiPro, XyWrite, DisplayWrite, .rtf, etc). We'll try (and hopefully in most cases we'll manage) to convert those files from other formats into WordPerfect 5.1.<55>Foot note 4_1
(2.2) When WP5.1 format is not available and we have been unable to use the original file, a good ideal is for the author to have their doc converted to a .html file (there are lots of HTML editors and document-to-HTML converters from a great many formats -- PC-Write, [La]TeX, MS-Word and Windows-Word etc). We expect HTML files to bear the extension `.htm'.<56>Foot note 4_2
(2.3) Another solution is to use [stripped and extended] ASCII format, which means: text files (not binary ones) written using any printable ASCII characters of Code-page 437 (USA or default), i.e. any character except ASCII_00 through ASCII_31; with CRs (carriage returns) only between paragraphs -- not as end-lines. Such files will here be called `ASCII files'. We expect them to bear the extension `.ASC'.
(2.4) Another alternative (which is in itself worse, but which nevertheless may be more practical in certain cases) is to use the DOS text format, with no character outside the range from ASCII_32 through ASCII_126, no hyphenation, a CR at the end of each line and two CRs separating paragraphs. Such files will be here called `text files'; we expect them to bear a `.txt' extension.
(3) In cases (2.2) and (2.4) the contributor can include their paper into an e_mail message sent to our editorial inbox ( <sorites@ifs.csic.es> )
(4) Before sending us their file the contributor is advised to compress it -- except in case they are sending us a text file through procedure (3) above. Compression reduces disk-storage and shortens transmission time. We can extract and expand files archived or compressed with Diet, ARJ (both warmly recommended), Tar, Arc, Zip (or PKZip), GZip, Compress (i.e. .Z files), LHA, Zoo, RaR, and some versions of the MAC archivers PackIT and StuffIT.
(5) The most expedient way for contributors to send us their submitted paper is through anonymous FTP. At your host's prompt, you enter `ftp ftp.csic.es'; when you are prompted for your username, you answer `ftp' or `anonymous'; when you are next prompted for your password, you answer with your e_mail address; once connected, you enter `cd pub/sorites/incoming', then `binary', and then `put xxx' -- where xxx is the file containing your submitted paper and a covering letter. (If the file is an archive, the extension must reveal the archiving utility employed: `.gz', `.Arj', `.RAR', etc. (DIETed files needn't bear any special denomination or mark; they will always be automatically recognized by our reading software.)
(6) Whenever a paper is submitted, its author must send us a covering letter as an e_mail message addressed to one of our editorial inboxes.
(7) If a contributor cannot upload their file through anonymous FTP, they can avail themselves of one of the following alternatives.
(7.1) If the file is a `.htm' or a `.txt' file (i.e. in cases (2.2) and (2.4)), simply include it into an e_mail message.
(7.2) In other cases, an 8-to-7 bits converter has to be used, upon which the result can also be included into an e_mail message. 8-to-7 bits convertors «translate» any file (even a binary file) into a text file with short lines which can be e-mailed. There are several useful 8-to-7 convertors, the most popular one being UUenCODE, which is a public domain software available for many different operative systems (Unix, OS/2, DOS etc). Perhaps the most advisable at this stage is PGP [`Pretty Good Privacy'], which also allows authentication (signing). Another good such convertor, very easy to use, is Mike Albert's ASCIIZE. We can also decode back into their binary original formats files encoded into an e-mailable ASCII format by other 8-to-7 bits convertors, such as: Mime, TxtBin, PopMail, NuPop, or University of Minnesota's BINHEX, which is available both for PC and for Macintosh computers. Whatever the 8-to-7 bits encoder used, large files had better be previously archived with Arj, Diet or any other compressor, the thus obtained archive becoming the input for an 8-to-7 bits convertor.<57>Foot note 4_3
(7.3) An alternative possibility for contributors whose submitted papers are WordPerfect 5.1 or WordPerfect 6 docs is for them to use a quite different 8-to-7 bits convertor, namely the one provided by the utility Convert.Exe included into the WordPerfect 5.1 package. (WordPerfect corporation also sells other enhanced versions of the convertor. WordPerfect 6.0 has incorporated a powerful conversion utility.) A separate e_mail message is mandatory in this case informing us of the procedure. The result of such a conversion is a `kermit-format' file.<58>Foot note 4_4
(8) You can also submit your manuscript in an electronic form mailing a diskette to the Submissions Editor (Prof. Prof. Manuel Liz, Facultad de Filosofia, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain). Diskettes will not be returned.
(9) Such submitted papers as are neither WordPerfect 5.1 files nor files in HTML format require some preparation.
(9.1) Ours is not a logic journal, but of course one of the glories of analytical philosophy is its rigour, which it partly owes to auxiliary use of symbolic notation in order to avoid ambiguities, make matters of scope clear or render arguments perspicuous. ASCII translations of symbolic notation are problematic, especially in cases of nonclassical logics, which may use sundry negations, disjunctions, conjunctions, conditionals, implications and also different universal and particular quantifiers (e.g. existentially and nonexistentially committed quantifiers, a familiar dichotomy in Meinongian circles). While using WordPerfect 5.1 you can represent a huge variety of such nuances, it is impossible to express them within the narrow framework of text or even ASCII files (i.e. even when the 224 printable [extended] ASCII characters can be used). Still, for some limited purposes, a translation of sorts can be attempted. You are free to choose your representation, but the following translation is -- for the time being -- a reasonable one: `(x)' for universal quantifier, `(Ex)' for existential quantifier; `&' for conjunction; `V' for disjunction; `->' for implication (if needed -- something stronger than the mere `if ... then'); `C' for conditional; `=>' for an alternative (still stronger?) implication; `_pos_' for a possibility operator; `_nec_' for a necessity operator.
(9.2) In ASCII or text files all notes must be end-notes, not foot-notes. Reference to them within the paper's body may be given in the form `\n/`, where n is the note's number (the note itself beginning with `\n/`, too, of course). No headings, footings, or page-breaks. In such files, bold or italic bust be replaced by underscores as follows: the italized phrase `for that reason' must be represented as `_for that reason_' (NOT: `_for_that_reason_'). A dash is represented by a sequence of a blanc space, two hyphens, and another blanc space.<59>Foot note 4_5