To Table of Contents No. 1

Editorial Considerations

Before the Internet Era, it was the 17th century which witnessed an enormous turn in scholarly communication, to wit the rise of learned journals, pioneered by Proceedings and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (founded in 1662). In 1750 there were in Europe ten scientific periodicals, ca. 1830 the number reached 300, ca. 1950 there was 100000, and this development according to the rule of exponential growth should lead to a milion of titles by the end of this century. In this dramatic overflow of information, the new easy method of generating journals due to the network technology seems to be no solace, rather a factor to aggravate the crisis.

On the other hand, ever more efficient information technologies provide us with a hope of overcoming the crisis/ At the same time, the new enormous communication facilities promise ever growing collaboration. The present project, which is to combine features of an academic newsletter and of a journal, is born from such a hope. The said combination is meant as follows.

EFEREEING is a vital ingredient in any research, but brain storming, a behaviour deliberately exempt from criticism, is vital too. Electronic publishing is ideal for the latter, but the former must retain its rank and function as well.

If a text has been accepted in a journal or a conference of high standing, then without refereeing it can be published in "Mathesis Universalis". Purposes and admissibility of multiple publications are discussed below in connexion with Copyright issues.

Recommendation by special referees, closest to high standards of academic journalism, will be resorted to if need be. Provided referees' agreement, their opinions will be available in the journal too.

OPYRIGHT, a thing that even in its established state has something metaphysical about it (as has any immaterial commodity) becomes still more intriguing when texts are being displayed without any institutional protection. The institution of a publisher connects the appearance of a text with a legal system, hence the rights of parties involved are fairly well defined and capable of being executed. Those who produce their texts in the network do not need technical assistance of a publisher, and thereby get deprived of his legal assistance too. Sometimes they do not wish the latter either, but those who do should be given the opportunity of having it.

This journal takes advantage of appropriate legal devices. It has got ISSN to introduce the journal into the system of library information, and is publihed by the subject registered as foundation under the Polish law (in the Court for Warsaw called "Sad Gospodarczy", Register No. 1914), and by virtue of its Chapter is authorised to act as publisher. As for the contributions to this journal, Copyright is reserved for the Foundation, but the Editor is authorised and willing to impart it to any Contributor who will wish so (then suitable information will be annexed to the paper in question).

A special Copyright problem may arise when a text becomes embedded into a greater whole - namely a hypertext - with a link produced by an anonymous WWW operator. How this is related to author's rights? A context may exert influence on the meaning of a newly included item, and there is no certainty that such influence will be harmless in each case. There is no ready answer to this question, but it can be looked for in the following considerations. Some rules of proper conduct can be shaped by a set of precedents, and the Editors of learned journals belong to those who should contribute to a reasonable practice. For instance, it is stated in the preamble to this journal that not only downloading for private use is permitted but also the linking of its items with other information resources (without excepting other journals). There is suggestion behind this that if such authorization is not given or reasonably supposed, then the text owner should be asked to agree to the link in question.

The present Editors intend to ask also for such linking permissions which would allow to list a linked paper in the table of contents of this journal on account of its relevance to the journal's concern. This can be seen as a multiple publication, one - so to speak - real (in the original resource), the other virtual (in this journal). Should we multiply publications in this way? There can be good reasons for that. Let it be noted that there are journals which are published both in hard copy and electronically. This clear case of multiplying is well advised because of different uses and addressees of either version.

A case not less convincing is that of interdisciplinary contributions. If a paper contributes something both to domain A and B, it is reasonable to publish it both in a journal concerned with A and in that concerned with B, each addressed to another audience. Analogous reasons motivate the publishing of a paper in various linguistic versions, each of them having different receivers. However, such multiple publications should be agreed among parties involved. In particular, the case of combining a hard copy version with an electronic one may prove advantageous for both sides, since a network publication, more likely to be found by those being interested (owing to links and to search engines), advertises that in the traditional journal; on the other hand, the process of refereeing, if done in the latter, spares time and effort of the networking editors.

These are examples of technical and organizational problems faced by such a pioneering enterprise as an electronic journal. To close this list of examples with an important problem, let me mention the need of hard copies to be stored in chosen libraries for documentation purposes. However, a solution will need a time as libraries lack suitable regulations for this kind of activity. Such technical matters having been hinted, it is in order to comment on the objective and the subject of this journal, as expressed in its title.

MATHESIS UNIVERSALIS is a term invented in the 17th century to stand for a universal method of sciences patterned on the deductive method of mathematics, but also for the unified science which would result from applying this method. The latter meaning depends on how one conceives mathematics -- a point at issue also in our times. For instance, when Alfred Tarski in his Introduction to Logic and to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences (Ch.6) equals the methodology of deductive sciences with the methodology of mathematics, this may mean that the whole of deductive sciences is seen as identical with mathematics; should we have eg deductive philosophy, it would belong to the so broadly construed mathematics. Heinrich Scholz (in notes to his Muenster lectures in 1934) when rendering this term in German as "generalisierte Mathematik", defines the so named field as the whole of mathematizable disciplines ("ein Inbegriff aller mathematisierbaren Wissenschaften"), including philosophy.

In either interpretation of the phrase "Mathesis Universalis" it is assumed that mathematical methods should be broadly applied to empirical domains. The meaning of this assumption is nicely exemplified by Newton's masterpiece Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) handling empirical reality with a calculus; even if a calculus lacks deductive ordering, it possesses an inborn aptitude for taking such a form.

What about applying a calculus to mental reality? The process of doing that started with George Boole who mathematically treated laws of logic called by him "laws of thought". Here let me ask the Reader about his understanding of the phrase "laws of thought": whether should it mean norms to be obeyed (as in jurisprudence) or a kind of natural laws? Does nature consist of bodies and minds? If so, the former would be governed by laws of physics, the latter by laws of logic and of some other calculi (subjective probability, information theory, decision theory, etc).

The answer in the affirmative to the question stated above (italicized) underlies the editorial policy of this journal. Yes, the mind belongs to nature and can be studied with the help of mathematical methods. Thus mathematics proves more universal than we are taught in secondary schools. So much we realize since Boole, but our time is ripe for more penetrating questions, concerning relationships between both kinds of law, as discussed, eg, under the heading "Information Physics" (it can be exemplified by Tom Stonier's Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe, Springer, London etc 1990). To bring up the issue, let me use a statement by Roger Penrose in his Shadows of the Mind. A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Vintage, London 1995), Section 4.1 ("The mind and physical laws").

We - our bodies and our minds - are part of a universe that obeys immensely subtle and broad-ranging mathematical laws. That our physical bodies are precisely constrained by these laws has become an accepted part of the modern scientific viewpoint. What about our minds?