Classifying False Voynich Decipherment "Solutions"

[Mark Knowles]

I think René means that one theorist is not able to asses another theorist's work, because they are similarly misled. For example, if I convince myself that the VM is the work of pope Innocent VII, and I see confirmation after confirmation that I am on the right track, I will have lost my ability to assess competing theories objectively.

The problem when it comes to this second class is that determining that such assertions are false is much harder to do, if they are indeed false.

Someone might argue that the author of the Voynich is Jewish. One could think that the arguments made for the author being Jewish are weak or flawed, however saying with complete confidence that the author was not Jewish is very hard. In fact I think if someone thinks that the author is Jewish it does not necessarily preclude them from analysing a theory that the author is of a different ethnicity, objectively.

By contract determining the falsity of Gerard Cheshire's theory is much more manageable.and reasonable a goal.

Pope Innocent VII was born in 1432, so on the basis of the carbon dating he would easily be excluded. However if someone were to say that the Voynich manuscript was a product of the Papacy of Martin V then that is hard to disprove even if we think it is not the case.

This is why I deliberately didn't want to include this so called second category in this thread.