Commentary: An explosion without a bang

Abstract

Consider a conflict between the following two accounts of the Kennedy assassination: (i) the Oswald theory (that Kennedy was killed by a guy named Oswald, who was born in New Orleans to those particular parents), and (ii) the conspiracy theory (that the whole thing was planned and carried out by the CIA and other government agencies). Now imagine counterfactually that, despite all the plausible evidence accumulated over the years and pointing to Lee Harvey Oswald as the culprit, it is eventually proved that he was not in Dallas at all on that fateful day and that the assassin was in fact his elder brother, Robert Oswald, Jr. Notice that the Oswald theory, the way it was described above, would strictly speaking still be true even under the new circumstances (because it only claimed that ‘Kennedy was killed by a guy named Oswald, who was born in New Orleans to those particular parents’). Nevertheless, is it not quite clear that we would all think that those who had defended the Oswald theory in the past were badly off the mark and that they surely have some serious re-examining to do?

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