Who shot JFK?

[ciphergoth]

For the purposes of this post, I don't really care who shot JFK; it's just a convenient mystery with which I can ask a question about truth.

Alice believes that Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK. She believes that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the Texas Book Depository, aimed a loaded rifle and shot JFK, at which point his head visibly exploded as seen in the Zapruder video.

Bert disagrees; he doesn't know for sure who shot JFK, but the one thing he's sure of is that Lee Harvey Oswald was not pointing a loaded rifle out of the window of the Texas Book Depository at the President at the fateful moment.

What do I believe? As I say, I neither know nor care, but there's one thing I know for sure: one of Alice or Bert is wrong. In sufficiently weird conditions both of them might be wrong, but one of them is wrong for sure. We may never know which of them is wrong, but at least one of them is definitely wrong.

Does anyone disagree with this?

Comments

[djm4]

Depends how metaphysical we're being, and how one thinks quantum physics behaves on a macroscopic scale. But in normal conversation, no, I don't disagree about that.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

*laughs* For me, if the question was about a nice, tightly-defined system where quantum physics applies then I'd be a lot happier giving definitive answers. Whereas in the world of normal conversation, it can be terribly dangerous to apply such hard-line rules.

So, to take another example (which will probably muddy ciphergoth's original purpose yet further), Dana thinks life begins at conception, Eddie thinks it begins at birth, and Fran thinks it begins at 24 weeks' gestation. You can't be so simplistic as to say that at least two of them are wrong: they may well be meaning different things by "life". If Dana thinks it means "existence as a defined set of chromosomes", Eddie thinks it means "legal personhood", and Fran that it means "point when it's (usually) illegal to deliberately kill someone", they could all be right.

(Example shamelessly adapted from The Onion.)

[djm4]

Yes, I agree completely. But the two examples are different. In yours, Dana, Eddie and Fran may (or may not) all agree about what they consider the 'facts' to be, but differ in how to interpret those with respect to saying when 'life' begins. In this case, it's possible for no-one to be factually wrong in their own terms, but for there still do be disagreement.

In ciphergoth's example, Alice and Bert disagree about things that they'd both, I think, consider factual. In their own terms, one or both of them must be factually wrong.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Ye-es, but I'm not so sure that "factually wrong" would necessarily be as important a wrongness to them as the phrase stated so baldly generally implies.

I devised Chris' scenario specifically as one that both Alice and Bert might be brought round to and yet remain convinced that they hadn't changed their position factually in any way that really counted. If the important thing for Alice is that Oswald was the killer, and the important thing for Bert is that Oswald wasn't in the Depository, and Chris talks to each of them very persuasively, they would probably both maintain that the other facts in their previous accounts don't really matter - they're just minor points of detail.

[djm4]

I probably wouldn't use the phrase 'factually wrong' to them, but I'm pretty sure that 'factually wrong' is how ciphergoth was using the phrase (and I did, really, mean 'normal conversation' with him, rather than with Alice or Bert).

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Indeed - but the thing I want to stress is that they both could feel that they were right in the important aspects. In real life, I can imagine Alice telling Bert that she didn't really care about the details and mechanics of who was where, it was the important fact of Oswald's guilt that was the key thing. And Bert being happy that he'd proved his main point.

(Although, to be fair, it's more likely that Bert would at that point start to have a go at Alice about how she can possibly know that Oswald was the assassin without knowing any details of how he did it or even could have done it.)

[djm4]

Then, of course, you need to consider Gordon and Harriet's little disagreement over whether or not the square root of minus one exists. Which is further confused by the fact that Ichabod doesn't even accept that minus one itself exists. ;-)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

It's also possible to have an example where everybody agrees on the definitions, but they all disagree on what the facts are. For example, Fred thinks licorice is delicious, Jim thinks licorice is disgusting.