[Article] Unconventional Methods in Voynich Manuscript Analysis

[Torsten]

I think it is fundamentally wrong to try to divide people into two (or more) camps, for example whether they are proponents or not of the natural language hypothesis.

I am reminded of the latest blog post of Rich Santacoloma, where he basically writes that everyone is working from a certain theory, and sees the evidence in light of this theory.

I know several people who are not working on the basis of any theory or hypothesis, but are still in the stage of 'collecting information'. This is certainly the case for myself. I am not aware of any evidence that tilts the balance of meaningful vs. meaningless into either direction.

My point was that it is necessary to consider all important observations. For such a statement it doesn't matter if the researcher is working from a certain theory or hypothesis or not.

If I am critical of certain approaches, it is often because I think that the conclusion is not sufficiently justified by the evidence (data) presented. This is both in case of your paper, and in the case of the Montemurro paper. Just as examples.

There is already a thread about my paper (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). I think this would be the right thread to post an opinion or an argumentation about it.

So in the first case I am not arguing that the text cannot be meaningless. It is just that this is not shown by the evidence presented. Similarly, but in the opposite sense, for the Montemurro paper.

You are arguing against something nobody said. The point was that you are right to point out that the Montemurro paper didn't address the difference between herbal A and herbal B. For such a statement it simply doesn't matter if the VMS-text was used to transport meaning or not.

What I do see evidence for in the MS text is 'intention'. This suggests that the text was not the result of chance (someone throwing dice, for example, or indeed moving cardan grilles across a table).

Indeed, the VMS-text is full of patterns. There is no doubt that they are not the result of chance (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

Another interesting aspect is that not only are arguments behind a paper or a proposed solution occasionally flawed, the same can be true for the arguments presented *against*  these theories. And of course it goes without saying that if an argument against a theory is flawed, this is not a point in support of this theory.

Indeed, it is important to present an argumentation for it or against it. It is fruitless to discuss only some opinions.

I don't know if the text is meaningful or not. Just as a small anecdote, in the late 90's there was a 'pizza bet' in the old Voynich mailing list. I don't remember the precise rules. Basically, everyone contributing had to present his favourite explanation for the MS text, and if some day the truth was known, I believe that everyone had to buy a pizza for the person who had it right. Mine was 'mostly meaningless, but with meaning in small parts'.

It seems that you believe that meaning is a property of a text. But meaning is something the writer of a text had in his mind (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Since language depends on its context it is always possible that a reader interprets a text differently. The only way to know if he understand the intentions of the writer correctly is to ask the writer about her/his intention. But even then a misunderstanding is possible. In the same way it is impossible to know if the writer had the intention to hide some meaning within the VMS-text or not: "it is impossible to devise an exact mathematical proof that an arbitrary set of strings is truly meaningless, or not. This would involve a general method to compute upper boundaries to the Kolmogorov complexity" (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 16).