Thread for all discussion about "genuine/meaningless/fake" etc

[RenegadeHealer]

I don't think that it is constructive to try to classify people based on their opinion. Everybody is free to change their opinion as they learn more, and not be forced to belong to some group. This is not politics, just an interest for a relatively unimportant historical document.

There should be no discussion like A-believers vs. B-believers.

René, I agree that the concept of "VMs skeptic", as I define it, is a tool of very limited use. I think I should clarify that I only use it to refer to the role somebody is playing in one specific discussion. I don't mean to imply that it's a static, global property of a person and their overall attitude toward the VMs. Compare the use of a term like "devil's advocate" — it's a role someone chooses to play in one debate, and says nothing about the person outside of that discussion. I think most of us here play the skeptic from time to time, when we encounter others' assumptions about the VMs that we don't hold, and are not comfortable getting on board with. That's a good thing. I am not a natural born skeptic; it's a role I've had to train myself to play. But questioning assumptions — one's own or those of others — is a valuable tool I'd encourage anyone to cultivate.

The point of my post is, I would caution anyone who chooses to play the skeptic in a VMs-related discussion, to be clear and consistent about exactly what assumption you are questioning or challenging. The same goes for anyone responding to someone playing the skeptic.

It's certainly not my intention to go off topic; feel free to spin this off into a different thread if you wish. To bring it back to the original post, Torsten Timm gives Bowern & Lindemann et al. 2020 a negative review. What comes through in his review is great frustration over the way B&L did not address, let alone rebut, the specific source of his skepticism. The nature and source of his skepticism is stated upfront at the very beginning of Timm & Schinner 2017. Torsten calls into question the assumption that forgery, by way of stochastically generated pseudo-language, is highly improbable. The goal of his and Prof Schinner's paper is to demonstrate that this possibility is still very much on the table. And to be fair, B&L's rebuttal to T&S is weak — they make a vague, un-sourced reference to somebody's attempt to produce large amounts of pseudo-language, which proved tedious and impractical. B&L give no examples of statistical tests which reliably distinguish stochastically generated pseudo-language from language.

What is striking to me, though, is the efforts B&L expend to lump together and collectively dismiss skeptics of the assumption that the VMs's text is meaningful, when this really wasn't necessary to make their case. All they really needed to do is acknowledge that this basis for skepticism exists and is justified, but that the possibility of a linguistic and/or meaningful text has not been ruled out, and is also still justified. Their treatment of this skepticism and its best known proponents makes me wonder if they're actually more threatened by this prospect than they let on.

Personally, I find the work of Donald Fisk and Wladimir Dulov, mapping the correspondences and associations between vords, a far stiffer challenge to the assumption of a meaningful VMs text than anything Torsten Timm or Gordon Rugg have published.