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

[kckluge]

I don't see ...

I can't respond to many your statements because they are simply declarations that overtly ignore the
explanations I provided. I am not trying to dismiss your responses - I just honestly can't conceive of how to break the logic down any further to make it easier to comprehend.

But I can leave you with the following two points. Of course, whether you choose to think them through or
not is entirely up to you.

1) If the modern forgery theory is "not falsifiable", then the alternative theory of authenticity must
necessarily be "not provable" ... fundamentally.
    (because A=true implies not-A=false)
Yet I suspect some of those who hold your view about the modern forgery theory being not falsifiable still blithely imagine a scenario where the Voynich has been proven to be authentic.

2) Now I'm sure the response by some to the above point (if not by you, by some others) will be
"that's right - we can never know for sure if either is true".
And that's fine if you want to go that way. (There is some truth to it - because evidence is never "absolute";
it always ranges between very weak and very strong.  I believe Rene alluded to the same thing earlier.
Mathematically, it is the reason we have to avoid probabilities being equal to 0.0 or 1.0 because various equations
inevitably blow up. But for practical purposes --i.e. in real life--, reasonable people accept that evidence can be either
strong enough, or weak enough, to provide an acceptable level of "proof" for or against a claim.)
If you don't want to accept evidence in a practical way -- that is, if you instead want to go with the "we can never know for sure if either is true" approach --  then
just be aware that that means there is no conceivable theory about the Voynich, or about anything else,
that is actually falsifiable (or provable).  One can ALWAYS come up with some conceivable explanation and then an
explanation for the explanation, and on and on until someone jumps the shark with "it's just glitch in the matrix".

With regard to point 1, I doubt it because no one who understood the concept of falsifiability would ever commit the error of thinking that you can prove the Voynich is authentic. You can't. You can only (potentially) falsify it's authenticity.

With regard to point two, "we can never know for sure if either is true" does not logically imply that we could never know (or at the very least have high certainty) if the authenticity hypothesis is false if that's the case . That's the whole point of falsifiability, which was Popper's attempt to cut the Gordian knot with regard to the 400+ year debate about the problem of induction by saying you can't solve the problem of induction and putting forward falsifiability as an alternative way of thinking about what constitutes a "good" theory. With regard to the rest of that paragraph, I am aware that there is a position that claims falsification is impossible because all observations are theory laden. I do not find it persuasive. Your mileage may vary.  

So suppose the C-14 dating had come back with a result that the calves whose hides were used died in the 1870s. It didn't -- but it could have. Had that happened, it's abstractly possible someone could have said, "well, the statement that the calves died in the 1870s is itself a heavily theory-laden claim that relies on a whole bunch of stuff being true all the way down to our theories about atomic structure, so " or "maybe those samples all coincidentally happened to have several-dozen-standard-deviations-from-the-mean fewer decay events than average, so shrug-emoji" but I doubt anyone would have seriously entertained either of those positions.

Meanwhile, there is no result that the C-14 dating could have found that could have falsified a "modern forgery" theory because there's no reason for a modern forgery theory to predict any particular constraints on the dates of any of the samples. This is not a subtle point.

Karl