"Not knowing", or changing one's mind.

[Torsten]

My main point, or at least what triggered my post, was that, while there are clear differences between the humanities and the 'exact sciences', these may not be so fundamental. It is certainly possible to do what one might call 'scientific' work in the humanities.

The second point was not to try to 'force decisions' when the information to do that is insufficient.

At the same time, it is perfectly valid to work on the basis of assumptions, as long as one does not overestimate the probability that the assumptions are correct.

I don't think that the Voynich MS is entirely unique as a field of unbounded amateur attention.
While all cases are different, there is also Egyptology, with its theories about the pyramids and the sphinx(es),
or "life in the universe" (especially when it comes to supposed visits to Earth).
There's much more, and each has its own community.

It is not an easy task to correct assumptions. 

In the case of the Egyptian hieroglyphs there was the assumption that the hieroglyphs represent symbolic rather than phonetic writing. In fact there was a good reason for such an assumption. There was the book Hieroglyphica (dating to about the 5th century) by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that explained the meaning of 200 hieroglyphs in such a way. Unfortunately the explanation given by Horapollo was wrong even if some hieroglyphs are identified correctly in his book. 
For this reason Anthansius Kircher's 'translations' were hampered by the fundamental notion that hieroglyphs recorded ideas and not the sounds of the language (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). This view changed as the Rosetta Stone was found. A first step was made by Thomas Young. Young was able to identify the name Ptolemy in the hieroglyphs, and he managed to correlate most of the hieroglyphs with their correct phonetic values. But even then Young was not able to shatter the established view that the script was picture writing. 
Champollion was able to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs since he checked this hypothesis. He counted the 486 words in the Greek text, and expected to find fewer in the hieroglyphic text, since the hieroglyphic text, was incomplete, only a portion of the text being extant. Instead, he counted 1419 hieroglyphs. This meant that there was no way that each hieroglyph could be an ideograph (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). To understand the nature of the script was the breakthrough for the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In the case of the VMS we also didn't know the nature of the script and therefore we simply didn't know what a word or letter in the VMS stands for. With other words the nature of the script is is the main problem for the VMS.