New Post: "I Do Listen to the Experts. Do YOU?"

[asteckley]

Saying "a clear reference to the manuscript from a pre-19th century source is one obvious possibility" is not at all obvious.  It's far too vague, since as Karl pointed out, the Kircher correpondence has been rejected.  What would be sufficiently "clear"?  If the reference also mentioned the naked ladies and the signature?  But wouldn't the counter-argument then be (as it is now) that Voynich must have somehow found out about it and based the manuscript off it?  Would it need to have been sealed for centuries, or would there be an argument that Voynich could have forged a seal?  This is why I don't think it's falsifiable because it doesn't seem possible to prove Voynich couldn't have, however unlikely it seems.

Well, let's walk through the problem...
All of the Kircher letters have been associated with the Voynich manuscript by way of their references to features.
The more specific the referred features are, the clearer it is that the referred item is indeed one and the same with the manuscript
that we have come to call the Voynich manuscript.  The less specific the features are, the greater the chance that the letter
may be referring to some other manuscript.

If none of the letters included anything more specific than say
"the book filled with some sort of mysterious steganography" (as one of them does), then
I would hope you could agree that that would not be very clear and that it might well be referring to many other possible manuscripts
besides the VMS.  On the other hand if a letter had said
"the book with over 200 folios, some of which could be extended out to much larger size than the rest,
and filled with many pictures of herbs and plants unseen in these parts, and other drawings of an
astrological nature, and many others of unclothed ladies, and having an abundance of strange script that denies all my
attempts to uncover meaning...", then the chances that it is referring to our VMS would be significantly greater, wouldn't it?
I think most reasonable people would probably consider that latter case to be a "clear reference" due to not only how well it matches the VMS, but also
how well it narrows the possibilities down to the VMS.

Now between those extremes is a whole spectrum of specificities of possible references.
Of course, there is some subjectivity as to where on the spectrum a reference becomes a "clear reference".

When I looked through those letters (based on the versions found at "http://philipneal.net/"), the
description that was farthest along the spectrum of clarity was
"From the pictures of herbs, of which there are a great many in the codex, and of varied images,
stars and other things bearing the appearance of chemical symbolism".  
To me that is a far more specific description than any of the other letters. (Maybe I missed one?)

And that description could be the VMS ... but it was far from clear that it had to be. It's hardly a stretch to imagine that 
many pictures of herbs and various images of stars and chemical symbols could describe some other manuscript of interest to the writer.
And I also questioned what "chemical symbolism" could refer to in the VMS, but figured that was simply my lack of knowledge of medieval writing and what they considered "chemical symbols". But with or without that.. it was still a pretty dubious reference.  (I later happened across one of Rich's blogs where he noted the same issue regarding chemical symbols, so perhaps it was not just my ignorance on the topic.)
In any case though, of all the passages that could connect the letters to the VMS by a direct description, this one seemed
easily the strongest. But as evidence goes, it really isn't that strong!
And it is certainly plausible that it is referring to some other manuscript. Even a couple of other references
like the general size of the manuscript, or anything that narrows down the possibility of it being some other book at least a little bit,
would reduce the plausibility of misidentification considerably.

So in short, a "clear reference" would be one where most people would agree that it is very likely
referring to the VMS. and only the VMS because the probability of a different candidate floating around at that time that also
matches the description is sufficiently improbable.

That, by the way, is also why "Voynich must have somehow found out about it and
based the manuscript off it" would NOT be a counter-argument. The clarity of a reference is not determined by whether Voynich
could have reproduced it -- it is determined by the unlikelihood that a description in a letter could apply to a different document than the VMS.