Cheshire Plant Paper

[-JKP-]

... The surprise with the article you cite, JKP, is that there is no precedent for identifying the plant drawn in the manuscript, it's the one and only author. This is the point that bothers me, the rest is less important, in my opinion...

I'm not sure what you mean, Ruby, about the plant identification.

Do you mean he's the only one who has suggested this identification? Or do you mean he didn't mention all the other people who suggested this identification (there are quite a few)?


I think the biggest problems with his paper are the following:

• He chose the origin of the plants based on where he thinks the manuscript originated. As Koen pointed out, this is confirmation bias.
  
• He confused two plants as being the same. He apparently can't tell the difference between a plant with petioles and one without, and a plant with a central stalk with a stem-based whorl and one without (these are very basic identification features). Half the paper is about a plant that is different from his plant ID of Paris because he got confused about a plant label online and mistakenly believes that Paris and Aconitum are the same plant. In other words, he included a large amount of irrelevant information about the wrong plant to promote his idea that the plant is Paris.
  
• He makes no effort to learn the correct terms for basic linguistics concepts or even for basic manuscript concepts (terms like "folio", "recto" and "verso"). He's in a hurry. He wants quick results, not correct results. This kind of haste almost always leads to sloppy research.
  
• His "solution" and translations are based on a simple substitution cipher combined with a significant dose of subjective interpretation. Unfortunately, his substitution chart is completely at odds with letter frequencies in Romance languages and he has provided no rationale for this.
  
• If he can't turn his translation into a word, he chooses a different word from a dozen different languages to try to force it to work. If the VMS is drawn from a dozen different languages, as he suggests, then it's a one-way cipher based on subjective selection and would not be translatable by Cheshire or by anyone else. Every person trying to use his system would get different results.
  

There are other problems, historical inaccuracies, logic problems, etc., but the points above need to be dealt with first before you can even get to the deeper problems.