Logical fallacy, also known as the "Fulton non sequitur".

In a nutshell, this fallacy breaks down into a false analogy:

x was once ridiculed by y for asserting a (then) unproven statement P was true.
P was later found to be true.

z is now being ridiculed by w for asserting a (currently) unproven statement Q is true.
Therefore, Q is almost certainly true.

Most often, x is named (as Columbus, Einstein, or Galileo) and y is characterized as a person (or group) that knew full well that P was true, but, for reasons of self-interest, ridiculed, vilified, or persecuted x. In like manner, the only reason why Q is not universally held as true is because of w's attitude towards z.

The fallacy is unmasked by removing the names -- the whole appeal of this analogy is the emotional impact of the name(s) involved. Not all ridiculous ideas are true, not all true ideas, even those considered "revolutionary" or "groundbreaking" were once ridiculed (examples that comes to mind are the 'double helix' structure of DNA and/or the translation of Cretan Linear B).

While it's a truism that "no man is a prophet in his own land" and Jesus and Socrates were both executed, it's also true that Buddha lived a long life as a respected preacher, and Mohammed rose from a  camel herder to great wealth and power. Galileo was put under house arrest (not executed) but his crime was publishing insulting fiction about the then current Pope (not a good thing to do if you lived in Italy during the Counter-Reformation), not supporting Copernicus. (It was Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake…but he also publicly supported reincarnation and a host of other oddball ideas -- again, not the best career move in that day and age). On the other hand, Isaac Newton's life was extremely placid, despite inventing physics as we know it, and Immanuel Kant's life was so placid as to be downright boring, even though he was the undisputed champ of Enlightenment philosophy. (And then, again, you get fellows like Goethe and Feynman, whose lives were quite eventful, but for ahem, other reasons…)
    
On the whole, science is not, as it's often been thought by people outside of the scientific establishment, a body of dogma, which is overturned every so often, but a range of ideas, some more certain than others. For a new theory to be adopted, it must not only account for new data, but also all the previous data that the old theory explained…it's not that the old theory was downright false, but partly true (the Ptolemaic solar system does, indeed, describe much of what you can actually see from Earth), and the new theory, if adopted is "even truer" (the Copernican system discards retrograde motion, for instance, in favor of a straightforward circular orbit for all planets). Kepler improves on this by accepting that parts of Copernicus are true, but then explains irregularities in the orbits of the planets (and the Moon) by making them ellipses, not perfect circles as was thought before (which really bent people out of shape, since heavenly bodies were supposed to be perfect in every way). Some theories have been really, really tested and are therefore "true" for all intents and purposes, such as gravity, and some, like the steady state theory of cosmology, seemed to hold up at the time, but now are pretty much discredited, unless someone comes up with a whole lot of new evidence.

Most of this stuff should be more-or-less self-evident to E2 readers, who are (mostly) a skeptical, well-informed bunch of people. However, in places like the Voynich Manuscript translation mailing list, I've seen "people laugh at me, therefore I must be right" bandied about as if this were unshakable evidence. Of course they're right, and they're going to prove that the VM is the work  of a) some kind of conspiracy, probably involving Goddess- and hermaphrodite-worshipping women "and the loving men they chose to let in" in Tuscany who were heavily into ob/gyn, b) that the formulae in the book are sound methods of healing by giving warm baths treated with sweet-smelling live flowers, and c) the book has been censored and vilified by the NSA, the Vatican and the AMA because of their 'industry of death' using unnatural petrochemical  drugs and treatments. They cite fluffy Wiccan texts and speculate on extraterrestrial origins, and confidently predict that once their ideas are accepted (by whom and how, I don't know -- probably word of mouth by holistic midwives) they're going to be billionaires and Western science and history (not to mention Christianity as we know it) are going to be exposed as the shams they are.

I agree that scholarship has been great, but really only at telling us what it is not. I don't think it will be found there, it compares to nothing else known. So while I do appreciate a group as a sounding board for ideas, and the existing corpus to help give a take off point in the general direction of whatever the Voynich might be, I don't think it is going to be found in "real scholarship", if you mean that in the sense of existing scholarship.
Just my opinion of course... you may be right, it could be in the known realm of things, waiting to be found. But I don't see it there, I think this is wholly different than anything else... so much so that all the knowledge in the world will not help one whit, except to show more blind alleys. Rich.


 
In other words, the VMS is gibberish, there's no way we can verify any translation whatsoever.

None of their methods, which mostly amount to assuming that the da Vinci Code is a work of investigative journalism and guessing from the pretty pictures, have so far yielded any translations applicable to the parts of the book they haven't worked on.

    They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Fulton….and they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

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