Toward an epistemology of the JFK assassination
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.