Dialectica publishes papers that attract the interest of members of its Editorial Committee and for which a positive case has been successfully made at an EC meeting.
Papers that are not published in Dialectica are not necessarily evaluated negatively; if a paper is not fished (adopted, considered potentially worth making a case for) by Editorial Committee members, this may have a large variety of reasons: lack of interest, of time, of competence, of ideas about suitable referees, of magnanimity, etc.
Authors of papers that are not fished are notified after a month.
Papers that are under consideration for longer than a month are read by at least one member of the Editorial Committee in view of making a case for the publication of this paper in an EC meeting; referee reports are commissioned in view of strengthening this case. If this process takes more than three months (which should happen only in very exceptional cases), authors are notified.
If the respective EC members drop their case (possibly in view of negative referee reports), authors are notified and may or may not receive comments on their papers.
If the case is made in an EC meeting, authors are notified of the positive or negative decision of the EC. A positive decision may be conditional on non-substantial, formal improvements or on a shortening of the paper.
By submitting their paper to Dialectica, authors assert that the work is their own and their coauthors’ and that all coauthors’ are listed. While they retain the copyright of their article, they give Dialectica the right to publish the article and its revisions under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).
Submitted papers should be in English, suitable for blind refereeing, and should not contain metadata, citations, or acknowledgements that help identify their authors. There are no style guidelines for initial submissions, though accepted papers will need an abstract to be published.
Decisions on submitted papers are of one of two types: positive or negative. A positive decision may be conditional, to varying degrees; a negative decision may include a comment to the effect that a resubmission of a substantially reworked version of the paper would be welcome. Such a comment does not mean that the decision is “revise & resubmit”; every submission is evaluated anew. Authors should not expect that their paper will be published if they satisfactorily take into account all the comments they previously received.
Note: Dialectica’s “fishpond model” for triple-blind refereeing is part of the ongoing research project “the philosophers’ workbench”, funded by swissuniversities. If you have comments or suggestions concerning our version of triple-blind refereeing, please post them here.