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

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

It depends on whether each of those clauses in their belief is independent of the others. If Alice states (LHO_location + rifle_aimed_by_him + JFK_went_bang), and the three points are deemed by her to be parts of one whole position, as soon as Bert (Bob's day off?) states (LHO_location_elsewhere) *or* states (rifle_aimed_elsewhere), one of their positions doesn't stack up.

How this translates from formal logic into the muzzy-headed ways people deal with the real world and the vague English language is a whole nother question - is the angle of the rifle sticking point, or the motive, or the exact position of LHO?

So I agree that one of them is definitely wrong in some respect, but how far that gets us with (for example) solving the murder, is a different question.