Talk:Decipherment

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From the article:

: (Decipherment) Is usually considered the second step in comprehension after cryptanalysis

That's odd, because as I understand it some degree of comprehension is usually needed in cryptanalysis, as otherwise a false decrypt is hard to discern from plaintext - can you explain? -- The Anome

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Hmm, let me think about it..

VERY good question.

:/

little guru

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I don't think the dead sea scrolls count under 'decipherment'. Conservation, transcription, translation, yes, but there were no particular problems reading the texts, since they were all in well-known script. --MichaelTinkler

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I have removed this definition (see text below) from the article, as it appears to be a personal concept, as opposed to a concept that is in general use:

(a Google search for "philosophy decipherment" finds pages about the main sense, not this). Could any expert in philosophy correct me (giving a reference) if I'm wrong? -- The Anome

:Decipherment is the Cryptanalysis of documents, events, lab experiments, body language etc. that a philosopher undertakes to get as close as possible to truth.

:Is usually considered the second step in comprehension after cryptanalysis

:Because of the fact that the epistemologist doesn't know if the reality that he is examining could be considered truth at first approach, he starts what is called scientific experimentation.

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The word decipherment is according to the dictionaries I have access to, just a synonym for "decoding". The article now deals almost exclusively with philological decipherment of unknown scripts/languages. Isn't that a bit like having an article about the "Oceans of the world" and spending the entire article talking about the Atlantic?? I know that Wikipedia isn't supposed to "define common words", but shouldn't the article at least give some form of mention of the fact that the word often means something else? --Gabbe 12:30 Jan 8, 2003 (UTC)

: I think I would agree with most of this. As I use the words, we have decypher=decrypt (if the underlying obscuration is a cypher), decode=decrypt (if underlying is a code), and cryptanalysis the process of doing decryption. Decypherment=an act of decyphering, and so on. The dictionary cited would seem to have missed a trick. The spelling difference between cy and ci has been a bit of a TT here on WP (see WikiProject Crytography at discussion/cypher vs cipher for extended coverage). ww 15:19, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

:: I vote for moving relevant (most) parts of this article to one entitled "Paleographic decipherment", or something along those lines. Simply "decipherment/decypherment" is far too ambiguous. —Gabbe 11:46, Dec 19, 2004 (UTC)

::: Perhaps, although we could keep it here, and simply have a disambiguation header at the top of the page saying something like "This article is about the analysis of documents in unknown languages; see cryptanalysis for a discussion of breaking secret codes and ciphers."? — Matt Crypto 00:45, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)