On plain texts and ciphers (a thought experiment)

[Emma May Smith]

Here's the thing: it doesn't really matter whether the Voynich script was invented completely new or adapted from an existing script. Plenty of people with the appropriate knowledge have looked at the script and nobody has identified it. That means it cannot be read using outside knowledge.

Well, it can be approached by adding hypotheses and testing them, that's what people are doing. That's just another avenue of solving the task, as opposed to trying to understand the script on its own. Actually, I have no problems with that, I don't want to say to anyone "don't do this or don't do that", I just put forth some reasoning of that some class of  hypotheses doesn't look plausible from the beginning, so it might be in vain to bother testing individual hypotheses on their own.

There's a risk of falling into speculation. The question of "do we know what it is?" has a fairly simple answer: no. The more complicated question of "can we build a plausible narrative of what it is?" has the worrying answer: yes, but we've no way to assess its truth.

I really want us, as researchers, to get away from the idea of identifying the script. If it's not obvious after a hundred years then any answer now will be too uncertain to be useful. We've found a limit of knowledge outside the text and so our answers must come from inside the text.