The overall plan for more fully describing the critical/scientific method for use in the JFK assassination

19 October 2002

    In the last few weeks I have received several requests to provide a full description of the methods that I use to think about the JFK assassination. At first I was surprised, but then discovered that the requestors were right—my JFK web site does not centralize this material enough. So I started thinking about how to fix this problem, and in the process discovered that various processes now described separately could be aggregated under a common framework (the scientific/critical method), which would reveal the unity of thinking that applies to them all. This approach would also stress the extremely important point that this method did not originate with me, but rather is just a recent embodiment of classical techniques developed and refined over centuries to millennia. I neither take nor deserve credit for any of them.
    The form of this expanded description will surely evolve over time. Right now, I foresee it consisting of a general rationalization (this page), a generic procedure (an update of the existing critical method), separate descriptions of the procedures for validating physical evidence and interpreting the validated physical evidence (each with brief illustrative examples), and a long list of detailed examples of evidence and reasoning. Stay tuned!