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

Hmm, let me think about it..

VERY good question.

little guru

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

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.

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)