[split] Authority and the Appeal to it.

[rikforto]

Constructive criticism is difficult here anyway, since one certainly cannot discuss the matter “on equal footing” with a professional paleographer.

A point I would develop in conjunction with this is that few people have been willing to take on the substance of her argument in detail, which is essentially about fine distinctions between how letters are formed by each proposed hand. Some of that is the genuine benefit of expertise---presumably, she knows what arguments her peers are going to find colorable and expects to find at least a portion of that audience sympathetic to her methods and judgements. This benefit is not absolute; it is quite possible to read her arguments and reject some part of her methods, judgements, or reasoning and therefore unsettle her conclusions. The difficulty here is that few people know the ins and outs of paleography and hence credibly making competing judgements and constructing counterarguments is genuinely challenging for most of us. As a result, few people directly point at, for instance, the hooks on the feet of the gallows as being problematic for her arguments and develop a case why.

I do tend to agree a little too much deference has been paid to her findings. The distinctions between the sub-Currier hands are quite fine, which is both exactly why we have experts and should engender some more caution among non-experts relying on her findings. But I also think there is a competing danger of substituting our own ignorance about how to do this work for credible criticism of that work, which is why we end up arguing about her "authority" and "expertise" rather than how she has applied the latter and why she might have accrued some of the former doing this kind of work.

Which leads to another thing I would point out, which is that "appeal to authority" is a much weaker charge when the authority is not general, but specific to the matter at hand. To use a contentious example with some apologies, and only because someone introduced the example You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. first, I would not lightly go toe-to-toe with Stolfi on Voynichese word structure, but I have no such compunctions when talking about reading Chinese characters as I have substantial experience doing so. LFD isn't getting deferred to on this matter simply because she is an authority in the general sense, but has become an authority on the matter at issue by doing this work well in the eyes of other people who know how to do this work. Just as I do not think the benefit of that expertise is absolute, the weakness of pointing out that people are deferring to her authority is not total either. However, her authority is directly applicable to the matter at hand! (pun intended) I would remind everyone that none of the informal "fallacies" are automatically invalid, and we can absolutely weigh a person's credibility when evaluating their position.

That said, what will move the substance of the conversation about her 5 hands forward is a clear, credible analysis of issues in her work held against credible judgments that differ. I have seen her welcome this kind of scrutiny, and I think we'd all be better for it. The issue is that that credibility is difficult for non-experts to muster not simply for social reasons, but because it takes time and experience to develop the art of doing these analyses