Scientific Progress

[Torsten]

How can a theory be proved or disproved, if not by checking if the theory aligns with the evidence?

Comparing with evidence is better than providing compatible hypotheses, but being compaible with the evidence is still not good enough. If there are several mutually exclusive hypotheses that are all compatible with the evidence, then we still do not know.

I didn't see any problems with multiple hypotheses. "Scientific inquiry includes creating a hypothesis through inductive reasoning, testing it through experiments and statistical analysis, and adjusting or discarding the hypothesis based on the results" (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

The property set of the Voynich text is unique and therefore distinctive. If there were multiple candidates for text generation methods, we could experiment with these methods to assess how closely they generate text with Voynich-like properties. We could then analyze the details of the best methods to see how they handle specific properties and identify any commonalities among them. Finally, we could use these results to develop an improved text generation method. 

However, your argument is that no matter how good a text generation method is, we still cannot know with absolute certainty. This suggests that it doesn't matter in your eyes how good an available hypotheses is since you would refuse any hypothesis as uncertain. The nature of truth and the discussion on how scientific statements relate to reality is for instance explained in the Wikipedia article about the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: "Should science aim to determine ultimate truth, or are there questions that science cannot answer? Scientific realists claim that science aims at truth and that one ought to regard scientific theories as true, approximately true, or likely true. Conversely, scientific anti-realists argue that science does not aim (or at least does not succeed) at truth, especially truth about unobservables like" the meaning of a text. I align with the realists and argue that testing hypotheses is useful. The goal is not to determine whether a hypothesis is definitively true, but rather to establish if it is the best-supported explanation of the world based on the evidence available today. If at a later day evidence surfaces that truly contradicts that hypothesis, I will be very happy to use the new knowledge to improve the hypothesis or if this is not possible to reject the hypothesis.

It gets worse when the 'compatibility' is subjective.
It gets even worse when it is so subjective that it hardly convinces anyone.

In another thread you just wrote: "Where the amateur community can really help is by analysing the text using software, statistics etc. ... I agree with the viewpoint that, what the text means (and implicitly whether it is meaningful or not), has to come from detailed, specific, concrete analyses. Here we have data that can be processed in an objective manner." (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) It is up to you if you test the compatibility by processing the detailed, specific, concrete statistics analyses which you say can be processed in an objective manner or if you rely on something else. I'm sure that some concrete tests would be more convincing than some unspecific comments about what is subjective in your eyes.