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

[keirf.livejournal.com]

Yes, I disagree.

[djm4]

Wow! Between reading this and replying, a 'not' has appeared at the crucial point in the third paragraph. If the post's going to keep playing tricks like that then I've no idea whether or not I disagree with it. ;-)

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

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.

Was there another way he could have shot JFK, for example, from a balcony?Alice does not say that he had to be pointing a rifle out the window.

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

ah, I thought that I'd just missed that not when I first read it!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

At least one of them is definitely wrong in at least one aspect of their accounts. Whether Alice or Bert think that aspect is important or salient isn't stated and can't be derived from the information given.

So, for instance, Chris believes that Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK, but that Lee Harvey Oswald was not in the Texas Book Depository but was standing on the grassy knoll, and fired a shotgun at the President, not a rifle. If Chris is right, Alice is wrong about Oswald's location, but not about who shot JFK, and Bert is right about Oswald's location but not to be uncertain about the shooter's identity.

(And I don't think you need particularly weird conditions for both Alice and Bert to be both wrong in at least some aspects - Oswald in the Depository but someone else firing the killing shot(s) is the basis of many (?most) conspiracy theories on the subject and isn't prima facie a weird condition.)

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

Assuming that what Alice believes is the direct opposite of what Bob belives and there's no wriggle room in your wording (like Oswald used a bit of string to pull the trigger, or was on the roof, or, or) then it's hard to see how anyone could disagree.

With things that really happen in the real human scale world it is impossible for both A and NotA to be true. Is that what you mean?

[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.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Difficult for me to say for certain, because I'm not sure about the details of what either Bert or Alice believe. For example, does either of them believe JFK was or could have been shot by more than one person, whether or not the shots were fateful or were intended to be? Does "that fateful moment" refer to any bullet hitting JFK or to a/the fatal bullet? Does Bert believe that LHO was *ever* in the book depository holding a rifle?

And so on.

This example gives the impression of being an analogy for something else. If so, perhaps I personally might find it easier to deal directly with the source material.

[karen2205]

Does anyone disagree with this?

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?

[battlekitty.livejournal.com]

I agree, however your sufficiently weird condition could be that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the book depository pointing a loaded gun out of the window but did not fire. (I suspect that is something that could be proven, though...)

In the meantime, my mind is just transfixed with the two male models on the grassy knoll... Zoolander has a lot to answer for...

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is what I was going to say. They can both be partially right if JFK was shot by Oswald, but not from the book depository, but they can't both be completely right as their accounts are contradictory.

I'm also interested that for Alice's account ciphergoth uses the word 'believes', which implies that she doesn't have any evidence, whereas he ascribes 'knowledge' to Bert - indicating that he perhaps has some additional information such as a watertight alibi for Oswald.

[werenerd.livejournal.com]

>> Does anyone disagree with this?

Yes. We could argue that point, and it would be just about as interesting as a discussion about the existance of God (although, I'm not sure which of us is cast in the role of the believer).

There is no truth, outside of our perception of the truth.

(or, if you prefer, without the presence of an omnipotent observer, the existence of a truth outside of our perception is irrelevant)

Both Alice and Bert’s positions are correct until such a time that one of them changes their opinion. Or until God comes down and adjudicates the question.

[werenerd.livejournal.com]

and to be clear, I consider discussions about the existance of God to be very very uninteresting :-)

[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.

In which case...

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest you look away now, as the old sports announcers used to say, because you'll probably not enjoy what's pretty obviously coming next.

[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.

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

You can't know for certain which is true, but you can look at the evidence, and decide which is more likely to be true.

But that is dependent upon believing that there is a factual truth "out there" to be found (although we cannot always discover what it is); that truth is not entirely subjective. But surely, your claim that if there were an omnipotent observer, they could find out the truth implies that there is in an objective truth.

[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).

Re: In which case...

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

*penny drops* Doh! Of course. Given that, I think I'd want to defend my line above in conversation with djm4 even more strongly! For Alice, the key fact is that Oswald is guilty - how he did it is not terribly relevant. Bert might think he can prove that Oswald wasn't in the Book Depository, but that's not going to convince Alice, since for her that was only ever a trivial detail.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

I'm probably about 85% certain that I agree, although that probability would change, although I'm not sure in which direction, if I understood quantum physics better (for which read at all, really)

[djm4]

I, personally, am arrogant enough to use the term 'wrong' for something that I believe sufficiently strongly to be so, even though I'm agnostic about wehther or not there is some factual truth 'out there'. But I do acknowledge that I'm using it in this limited sense.

[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.)

[adjectivemarcus.livejournal.com]

There is no truth, outside of our perception of the truth.

So ... you're saying that "There is no truth, outside of our perception of the truth" isn't true too, then - it's just something that you perceive to be true? (c:

Re: In which case...

[djm4]

Well, yes, but if Chris turns out to be correct, then they still said things that they were wrong about, even if in their mind they classify it as 'well, maybe I was wrong about that, but it wasn't important and so doesn't change my basic point'.