Kenneth A. Rahn
Center for Atmospheric Chemistry Studies
Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island
Narragansett, RI 02882-1197
E-mail: krahn@uri.edu

At the risk of sounding truly iconoclastic, I propose that we have all the evidence on the JFK assassination necessary to extract about as many conclusions as we are ever going to get. Furthermore, we have had these data for at least two decades. I have become convinced that the problem with understanding the JFK assassination is neither the amount or the quality of the evidence, but rather the tools we bring to it. In short, we need to slow the relentless search for more information and speed the search for the proper way to work with it—we need a "JFK epistemology." If you don’t believe this, compare a contemporary conspiracy book with one from 20–30 years ago, and you will see that the topics are far more similar than different. Little of substance has changed. The research community is not advancing because it is shunning the centuries-old principles of critical thinking in favor of ill-conceived, ad hoc approaches that hopelessly confuse every issue they touch. The resulting waste of good people’s time and energy is staggering. It is time to accept the wisdom of the centuries and reform our ways of thinking.

This talk will first survey the four branches of epistemology: the nature, sources, validity, and extent of knowledge. It will then note that just as the goal of epistemology is to develop a reliable pathway to the truth, a JFK epistemology will seek to find the reliable way to the truth behind the evidence on the assassination. The talk will then briefly deal with a few important preliminaries such as recognizing the uniqueness of the right path and the right answer, defining a few important terms, grasping a few important underlying concepts such as belief vs. proof, and surveying the types of evidence and their properties. It will conclude what should be obvious, namely that the surest path through the evidence lies in beginning with only the falsifiable evidence, which is a tiny minority of the whole. It will then offer an eight-step modification of the scientific method that is appropriate to the assassination and to many other of life’s problems. As an illustration of Step 2, listing all possible answers to a problem before proceeding, a straightforward resolution of the infamous single-bullet theory will be offered. Along the way, the critical conjectural nature of knowledge (Sir Karl Popper) and the principle of parsimony (William of Ockham) will be defined and illustrated.

After all these preliminaries, the evidence on the assassination will be viewed through the eyes of this epistemology. Stated equivalently, I will show how the assassination appears when considering only the evidence known to be true (the only defensible starting point). This assassination looks very different from the one portrayed in the vast majority of conspiracy books. It consists of two shots fired from Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle on the sixth floor of the Depository that wounded two men and caused two movements of Kennedy’s head and torso. In effect, everything that mattered came from two "single bullets." It has no need of conspiracy at any level to explain any of this secure evidence. It is short, sweet, simple, and in its own strange way, logical. It also implies that the national angst and soul-searching that followed the assassination was largely unnecessary. Although it is not necessarily the ultimate answer, it is the only one that we may logically extract from the available evidence. Anything beyond this is fantasy.

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