Two Fallacies

A child of five could understand this.
Send someone to fetch a child of five!

― Groucho Marx

We are wedged between two fallacies when studying the Voynich manuscript: the layman is prone to one, and the expert is prone to the other. There are countless examples of both.

The first is the simplicity fallacy. This assumes that everything in the manuscript is as it seems. The fallacy gives rise to naive readings. The work is deceptively simple. The art is folkish and the text is clear and open. It invites surface-level readings. It is easy to misconstrue the work as unsophisticated. The worst danger is to assume that because the illustrations are somewhat crude and simplistic, that these qualities extend to the text.

Such readings are a-historical: they fail to appreciate the capabilities of medieval authors and underestimate the divide between the medieval and modern mindsets. Medieval simplicity is not the same as modern simplicity. The simplicity fallacy overlooks subtlety, nuance, symbolism, allegory and a host of common medieval conventions and tricks and it treats the work as if it is a modern text. It underestimates the work.

The second fallacy is the opposite: the complexity fallacy. This sees hidden meanings everywhere. This is the cryptologist’s fallacy. Losing all trust in plain appearances, this fallacy assumes that the work is fiendishly sophisticated and every jot and tittle is significant. Nothing is by accident. Nothing is straightforward. Nothing is as it seems.

You can recognize this fallacy by the proliferation of terms put in inverted commas. Victims of this fallacy start referring to “words” and “letters” and “alphabets” and “nymphs” and “herbs”  and "maps" as if all of these terms are deceptive and should be taken with a grain of salt. The author, they suggest, must have been a genius who has encoded secret meanings in every slip of the pen. It is an overestimation.

At its most extreme, this view – an intellectual paranoia - supposes that the entire work is a deception: it is not really a herbal, it is actually about secret military technology cleverly disguised as herbs, or similar.

The complexity fallacy overlooks the plain truth and makes a problem of what is not problematic. The usual cure for the complexity fallacy is Occam's Razor. As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The two fallacies might be compared to taking either a telescope or a microscope to the document. One produces an unjustified big-picture simplification, the other an unwarranted, obsessive complication. One can’t see the trees for the forest: one can’t see the forest for the trees. It is an unhappy polarity.

Like Aristotelean virtue, the reality is entirely likely to be somewhere in between. The study of the Voynich requires a sure sense of balance between the two pitfalls. No, the text is not a simple mapping of a natural language that everyone has missed, and the EVA word Oreo doesn't refer to a brand of cookies, but neither is the text an ingenious cipher of Newboldean microdots. It is always important to navigate between Scylla and Carybdos.

The surest approach is to assume a complicated simplicity. The solution, in the end, is likely to be simple, but there have been certain complications, by design or by accident, that have prevented us from seeing it.

R. B.