[Interview] An interview with Stephen Bax

[Stephen.Bax]

Naturally, I'm deeply honoured that Bax felt bothered enough about my long-standing criticisms of his Voynich theory, his decoding methodology, and his internally weak arguments that he would use this video as a platform to direct a series of close-to-libelous personal attacks in my direction.

However, if he had spent even 10% of the time he invested in trying to shoot the messenger in reflecting on the actual problems I highlighted, he might well instead have concluded that building his theory on top of (a) page-initial + gallows-initial words and (b) other people's highly interpretative herbal identifications are two central strategic mistakes from which his theorizing could never recover, not in 10 years or even 100 years.

Also somewhat galling was Bax's eagerness to denigrate Currier's work as linguistically naive (i.e. that differences could be explained away as scribal variations), and even to disparage the usefulness of computer-aided statistical analysis in general (that to be useful it "needs to be grounded in linguistics", I think he said). Any theory that requires such basic pillars of research to be undermined is close to a religion, i.e. one that places faith over rationality.

Same old same old stuff again, ho hum. I need only direct people to my earlier rebuttal of Pelling's criticisms and let you all judge for yourselves. It is all there, chapter and verse:

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I suggest that anyone reading Pelling's attack and my rebuttal will agree with me that:
 
"you have simply not engaged with the arguments carefully and in detail, and not understood some fairly elementary aspects of how languages and scripts work. Sorry to be so direct about it, but I feel it is important to be clear."

More:

1. Regarding Currier, he was simply mistaken to use the terms 'Language A and 'Language B'  when he was analysing at the level of script. And it has caused a lot of problems for years to people who don't understand the difference between script and language. I did not 'denigrate' Currier, merely pointed out that his description was wrong. (See the video at around 1hr 1 minute).

2. re."computer-aided statistical analysis" - please listen to the interview. I said that since we cannot even work out what the Voynich letters are with full precision (for example because of the minim problem You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) then computer aided analysis is very problematic.

So to suggest that my theory "requires such basic pillars of research to be undermined" is just another childish slur. (P.S I am Director of Research Excellence at the Open University, so maybe I have some idea about what I am talking about.)

And we could equally ask Pelling - what progress have you made in thirty years in decoding even ONE word, on the basis of the cypher hypothesis? Sorry to ask, but someone has to!