The Central Fallacy of JFK Research
June 2000

    This first essay considers what I will call, for lack of a better name, "The Central Fallacy of JFK Research." In effect, this fallacy is a misuse of the Argument ad Ignorantiam—the Argument from Ignorance—by many JFK researchers of all persuasions. The Argument ad Ignorantiam is the fallacy of reasoning that a proposition is true simply because it has not been proven false, or the converse, that a proposition is false simply because it has not been proven true. A simple example might be the deduction that extraterrestrials have not landed on earth because we have no hard proof of it. The proposition is that extraterrestrials have landed on earth; the deduction is that it is false because no physical evidence has been found for any such landings; the fallacy is that lack of physical evidence does not mean that it does not exist or that they could not have landed without leaving physical traces.
    The JFK case has two versions of this fallacy:

• It was nonconspiracy because conspiracy has not yet been proven.
• It was conspiracy because nonconspiracy has not yet been proven.

The first of these is argued by those who reject conspiracy, the second by those who accept conspiracy. Let us consider them individually, beginning with the second.
    We very often hear conspiracy theorists make statements such as "In all these years, not one scintilla of evidence has arisen to support the idea of Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone." This is an overstated version of "It was conspiracy because there has arisen no credible evidence for nonconspiracy." This version of the Argument ad Ignorantiam is easy to deal with because we don’t even have to worry about the fallacy—the starting proposition that one can prove nonconspiracy is already flawed. Obviously, one can never truly prove nonconspiracy because that would require us to consider each person on earth and certify individually that they did not participate in the proposed conspiracy. So, no conspiracy theorist should ever try to prove conspiracy by the absence of nonconspiracy.
    The first version of the fallacy is much more substantive. A nonconspiracist might propose that JFK was not killed by a conspiracy because there exists no strong evidence for such a conspiracy (where "strong evidence" refers to objectively falsifiable evidence in the sense that Sir Karl Popper uses it). Conspiracy theorists could then counter that from the Argument ad Ignorantiam fallacy, conspiracy cannot be denied solely from lack of proof for it. They would be technically correct, of course, to the extent that they are interpreting the fallacy literally. But they would be neglecting a crucial factor—the massive amount of time and effort spent over 36 years by multiple governmental agencies, governmental investigations, private organizations, passionate individuals, and other qualified people to turn up proof of conspiracy, all without succeeding. To fail to draw the obvious conclusion from this, namely that any such conspiracy would be exceedingly improbable because it would almost certainly have been unearthed by all this concerted effort, is as erroneous as employing the letter of the fallacy to deny the conspiracy. Thus, those who argue the fallacy would be guilty of using it narrowly and incompletely—in a sense, fallaciously.
    The message here is simple and direct: With every passing year, the continuing failure to turn up hard evidence of conspiracy just tightens the knot around those who continue to proclaim it with undiminished force. Theirs will increasingly become a crusade rather than a rational investigation—a system of belief, even one of faith, rather than fact—if it has not become so already. Those who carry on without solid support must accept that the probability of their being vindicated will inexorably decline, if it has not already done so. Those who try to counteract the obvious lack of evidence by racheting their rhetoric ever higher will run the risk of its becoming empty and hollow—rhetoric without reason—if they have not already.
    Thus the continuing lack of strong evidence specific to conspiracy makes it an increasingly untenable proposition. Slowly but surely, the probability of nonconspiracy is climbing ever-higher. Every tick of the clock raises it inexorably, as does every national meeting where reams of inconclusive and irrelevant "evidence" are presented at great length and their significance greatly exaggerated.
    Let us be clear one critical point. Nothing in this argument prohibits conspiracy. Perhaps tomorrow the smoking gun will be found and conspiracy will be proven. But for 36 years nothing like this has happened—that history of nonaccomplishment must count for a tremendous lot.
    Again, this is less an argument against conspiracy per se than an argument against demonstrated conspiracy. All of us devoted to this case must learn to operate on two mental tracks simultaneously—keeping our minds open to all future possibilities while properly recognizing the meaning of the current probabilities.