Who shot JFK?
May. 19th, 2008 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ciphergothFor 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?
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?
no subject
Date: 2008-05-19 01:10 pm (UTC)Yes. They could both be some degree of right.
If Alice *believes* all that she says, rather than *knows* because she's witnessed it first hand, then she's 'right' in the sense of her beliefs probably being reasonable until proven otherwise.
If Bert is *sure* of one thing, he might be right about that thing while being wrong/not having knowledge about any of the rest of it.
And that's just the semantics - people's subjective experiences of an event can lead to them recounting an experience accurately but wholly differently from one another without any of them being 'wrong'. Both could be partially right - a head might have exploded, but how would a non-trained person know where the bullet (if it was a bullet) had come from to cause the explosion? Someone might have been standing pointing a loaded rifle from the Texas Book Depository, but how would someone standing at street level identify such a person accurately?