The journal's home page states that "The main criterion for acceptance will be the quality of the arguments given." The principles of deductive logic are pretty cut and dry, so evaluating the quality of a rhetorical argument boils down to (1) making sure there are no logical fallacies, and (2) judging the strength of the assumptions made.
I suspect that the vast majority of papers which are "unscientific, incorrect, or in bad faith" would be filtered out at step (1), at least if the reviewers are sufficiently adept at deconstructing logical arguments. Furthermore, judging by the content of the first issue, it appears that the editors intend to focus on topics for which the assumptions (2) can be plainly stated and understood by the average academic.
Unless the journal only accept papers on logic itself, there's no way in which the criteria can be only "quality of argument". If one is making arguments about the real, one has to begin with assumptions that are plausible rather than certain and go from there. And what an editor considers plausible varies by what intellectual, political, scientific or whatever tradition they begin with.
> Unless the journal only accept papers on logic itself
A journal that was focused on "logic itself" would belong in pure mathematics.
> what an editor considers plausible varies by what intellectual, political, scientific or whatever tradition they begin with.
Not necessarily; one need not make independent claims about plausibility of an assumption in order to construct powerful logical arguments around it. This is pretty much the only game in town in philosophy, but scientific arguments must also adhere to the rules of deductive logic. And scientists are not necessarily expert logicians--they do commit logical fallacies. John Ioannidis has basically built his entire reputation on finding logical fallacies in otherwise "hard" research.
Not necessarily; one need not make independent claims about plausibility of an assumption in order to construct powerful logical arguments around it.
What's a "powerful" logical argument?
I remember when GPT-2 first came out, OpenAI published an article it generated about the history of unicorns in Peru. Facile text was quite readable and apparently well written. That it's common knowledge that unicorns do not exist left the entire construct lacking believability.
Perhaps this "journal of controversial ideas" could publish an endless stream of automatically generated texts involving logical deductions based on arbitrary, implausible assumptions.
scientific arguments must also adhere to the rules of deductive logic
This statements sounds like it was written by someone with no experience reading actual scientific papers. Most papers from most fields use plausible arguments drawn from statistics and tradition.
I suspect that the vast majority of papers which are "unscientific, incorrect, or in bad faith" would be filtered out at step (1), at least if the reviewers are sufficiently adept at deconstructing logical arguments. Furthermore, judging by the content of the first issue, it appears that the editors intend to focus on topics for which the assumptions (2) can be plainly stated and understood by the average academic.