Scientific Progress

[Mark Knowles]

It has been shown time and time again that forming a premature hypothesis about the VM leads to the curse of confirmation bias. I personally believe in trying to produce small but relatively solid building blocks.

There are two issues here.

1) How do research advances happen in practice? This is a general question. I don't believe Voynich research should be fundamentally different.

2) It is better to have theories even if the theorists, as most are, are prone to confirmation bias. I imagine that theorists in all fields of science have a tendency towards confirmation bias and yet science persists. Determining whether someone has confirmation bias is difficult anyway.

The vision of producing small building blocks seems a nice one, but not one I think that reflects how a significant part of progress is made.

Koen: You, yourself, have produced a variety of theories of various aspects of the Voynich, I believe. By your argument it would seem that most of these are redundant as they don't constitute small building blocks.