Pelling traps

Here I heed Nick Pelling’s warning:

“The general problem is that once you really latch onto a piece of evidence or a particular angle, you can easily become trapped inside it: and even though the solution you then reach may be entirely logical, it is almost always inconsistent with the other kinds of evidence and types of angle, and hence is almost always nonsensical.”

Currently, I am pursuing a particular angle towards a solution to the mystery of the Voynich text. In my own mind, I am making progress. I am working towards what I see as a logical solution. 

But is it a ‘Pelling trap’? 

There is an abundance of evidence pointing in other directions. Worse, there is a ridiculous number of other researchers all content on their own approaches and all convinced they are moving towards a logical solution. 

As Pelling warns, each of these ‘solutions’ may in fact be a self-contained trap, and it may not make sense in a larger context. 

This means that the internal coherence of a ‘solution’ may, in reality, be the very thing that misleads us. What we think is ‘logic’ is really the noose getting tighter. 

It is a treacherous text. We ought to be wary when it seems friendly and perspicuous.

* * *

I am, for a start, swimming in confirmation bias. I am a student of Platonic cosmology, with a PhD thesis on Plato’s Timaeus. Then – lo and behold! – I decide the Voynich manuscript is a work of early Reniassance Platonic – or Neoplatonic – cosmology. No surprises. Was I ever going to see it as anything else? 

Linguists see language, Germans see German, and cryptologists see encryption. 

It is an unavoidable consequence of expertise. If you have spent thirty years studying herbalism, you are going to see the manuscript through the lens of that expertise. Whatever value there is in the expertise, it is still a limitation. 

Confirmation bias isn’t necessarily wrong. It could be the right bias. The bias of Slovenians to see Slovenian might be the right bias, if the text turns out to be Slovenian. 

I think, in my case, that “Neoplatonic” is sufficiently broad and rubbery, and so in keeping with the (premodern) cosmology of the period – whether Islamic or Christian, or Jewish – that it is an appropriate bias to have. 

All the same, it no doubt blinds me to other possibilities, and inclines me to see “Neoplatonic” things that might or might not be there. 

* * *

I am very aware, for example, that I too readily discount cryptological solutions – because I know next to nothing about early Renaissance cryptology. 

I describe a system of dual paradigms, with the text generated from them in some manner analogous to the cycles of the year. That is where my studies have taken me. 

But might all this be a screen for a verbose cipher? 

Since I know nothing about verbose ciphers, I ignore that possibility, and instead spend years inside a ‘Pelling trap’ giving a detailed account of what is, in reality, a deliberate distraction. 

I also know next to nothing about phonological linguistics. Are there phonic values to the glyphs? 

Some of the glyph transmutations I casually ascribe to a system of paradigms, which I glorify as verbum potentiae, might be better explained in terms of phonology, as elisions and other phonological transformations. 

My bias is to see it as a constructed, conceptual language, or quasi-language, a type of philosophical experiment: I do not look towards natural language solutions. 

Or not anymore. I started by looking for natural language solutions, but decided I was looking at an artificial text, not a natural language. 

But that might have been because the linguistic task is beyond me, not my expertise. 

At one crossroad after another I have steered my consideration of the Voynich text towards my expertise, and my bias. 

But everyone does. 

But just as surely, not everyone can be right. Some researchers must be utterly mistaken. I might well be one of them. The field, after all, is already strewn with the dead and wounded. 

What features of the Voynich text do you see? What hierarchy of importance do you apply to them?

In my view, we should be guided by what is peculiar and unusual. But one needs to be a master of many fields in order to be able to discern what is peculiar and unusual. 

And we do not live in an age of great polymaths. 

* * *

Given these limitations, therefore, all one can do is proceed with caution, forever looking back and wondering if you’ve taken the wrong turn at one of the previous crossroads. 

The trouble with a ‘Pelling trap’ is that it can consume unconscionable swathes of your life before you even know it. 

Fifteen years down the wrong rabbit hole!

In that case, the journey will have to be its own reward. 

All the same, someone must be right. We live in hope. The very nature of the thing says that there must be some solution. 

And that solution will, I imagine, necessarily blow all the other possibilities out of the water, rendering them all obsolete in a single blow. 

A real solution will not only explain what the text is, but will explain why it seems to be so many other things as well. 

If the solution is that the text is some presentation of some natural language, it will also explain why it seems mechanical, artificial, and why it suggests methods of encryption, and so on, all the features of the text. It will explain all the ways it does not behave like a natural language. 

A true solution will provide a comprehensive account of the entire phenomenon. 

To be optmistic about it, and to mix metaphors, one of these Pelling traps will turn out not to be a trap at all, but the motherload, and it will explain all the other veins and tributaries in one fell swoop. 

The question all researchers must ask is: Do I have the time, and is it worth it? Or, if you’re an academic: Will it help me get tenure? 

R.B.