CRITICAL THINKING ABOUT CONSPIRACY THEORIES

 

 

1. Introduction

 

Conspiracy theories play a major part in popular thinking about the way the world, especially the political world, operates. And yet they have received curiously little attention from philosophers and others with a professional interest in reasoning.[1] Though this situation is now starting to change, it is the purpose of this paper to approach this topic from the viewpoint of critical thinking, to ask if there are particular absences or deformities of critical thinking skills which are symptomatic of conspiracy theorising, and whether better teaching of reasoning may guard against them.

 

That conspiracy thinking is widespread can be seen from any cursory examination of a bookshop or magazine stand. There are not only large amounts of blatant conspiracy work, often dealing with American political assassinations and other events or with the alleged presence of extraterrestrial spacecraft, but also large amounts of writing where a certain degree of conspiracy thinking is more or less implicit. Thus many ‘alternative’ works of medicine, history, archaeology, technology, etc. often depend upon claims, explicit or otherwise, that an establishment or orthodoxy conspires to suppress alternative views. Orthodox medicine in cahoots with the multinational drug companies conspires to suppress the claims of homeopathy, orthodox archaeologists through malice or blindness conspire to suppress the truth about the construction of the Pyramids, and so on. It certainly seems to the jaundiced observer that there is more of this stuff about then ever before.

 

However, conspiracy theorising is now coming to the attention of philosophers. That it has taken this long may be because, as Brian Keeley says in a recent paper, ‘most academics simply find the conspiracy theories of popular culture to be silly and without merit.’ (1999: 109n) But I agree with Keeley’s further remark that ‘it is incumbent upon philosophers to provide analysis of the errors involved with common delusions, if that is indeed what they are.’ If a kind of academic snobbishness underlies our previous refusal to get involved here, there may be another reason. Conspiracy theorising, in political philosophy at least, has been identified with irrationality of the worst sort—here the locus classicus may be some dismissive remarks made by Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies (Popper 1996, Vol.2: 94-9). Pigden (1993) shows convincingly that Popper’s remarks cannot be taken to support a rational presumption against conspiracy theories in history and politics.

 

But certainly such a presumption exists, particularly amongst political commentators. It tends to manifest itself in a noisy preference for what is termed the ‘cock-up’ theory of history—an unfortunate term that tends to assume that history is composed entirely of errors, accidents and unforeseen consequences. If such a dismal state of affairs were indeed to be the case, then there would seem to be no point in anybody trying to do anything. The cock-up theory, then, is agreeable to all forms of quietism. But we have no reason to believe that there is such a coherent theory, and even less reason to believe that every event must fall neatly into one or other category here; indeed, this insistence on black and white reasoning is, as we shall see, one of the features of conspiracy theorising itself!

 

And what makes the self-satisfied ‘cock-up’ stance even less acceptable is that it ignores the fact that conspiracies are a very real part of our world. No serious historian denies that a somewhat amateurish conspiracy lay behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, or that a more professional but sadly less successful conspiracy attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the summer of 1944. Yet such is the presumption behind the cock-up stance that the existence or frequency of genuine conspiracies is often significantly downplayed. (How many people, taking at face value the cock-up theorists’ claim that conspiracies are a real rarity in the modern history of democracies, do not know that a mere 13 years before President Kennedy’s assassination a serious terrorist conspiracy to murder Harry S. Truman led to a fatal gunfight on the streets of Washington?[2]  The cock-up presumption seems to generate a kind of amnesia here.)

 

We require, then, some view of events that allows for the accidental and the planned, the deliberate and the contingent: history as a tapestry of conspiracies and cock-ups and much intentional action that is neither. Pigden (op.cit) satisfactorily demonstrates the unlikelihood of there being any adequate a priori exclusion principle here, in the face of the reality of at least some real conspiracies. Keeley’s paper attempts a more rigorous definition of the phenomenon, hoping to separate what he terms Unwarranted Conspiracy Theories (UCTs) from rational or warranted conspiratorial explanations:

It is thought that this class of explanation [UCTs] can be distinguished analytically from those theories which deserve our assent. The idea is that we can do with conspiracy theories what David Hume (1748) did with miracles: show that there is a class of explanations to which we should not assent, by definition.  (Keeley: 111)

and it is part of his conclusion that ‘this task is not as simple as we might have heretofore imagined.’ (ibid.)

 

Keeley concludes that ‘much of the intuitive “problem” with conspiracy theories is a problem with the theorists themselves, and not a feature of the theories they produce’ (Ibid: 126) and it is this point I want to take up in this paper. What sort of thinking goes on in arriving at UCTs and what sort of things go wrong? If we say that conspiracy theorists are irrational, do we mean only that they are illogical in their reasoning? Or are there particular critical thinking skills missing or being misused?

 

2. Definitions

 

Keeley’s use of the term Unwarranted Conspiracy Theory should not mislead us into thinking that all conspiracy theories fall into one or other category here. Warrant is a matter of degree, and so is conspiracy. There are cases where a conspiratorial explanation is plainly rational; take, for instance, the aforementioned July Bomb Plot to kill Hitler, where there is an abundance of historical evidence about the conspirators and their aims. There are cases where such an explanation is clearly irrational: I shall argue later in the paper that this is most probably the case for the assassination of President Kennedy. And there are cases where some conspiratorial explanation may be warranted but it is hard to know how far the warrant should extend.

 

Take, for instance, the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. There was plainly a conspiracy to bring this about: some minutes before Gavril Princips shot the archduke, a co-conspirator was arrested after throwing a bomb (which failed to explode) at the archduke’s car. Princips and his fellow students were Serbian nationalists, acting together to demonstrate against the presence of Habsburg influence in the Balkans. But there remains the possibility that they had been infiltrated and manipulated by Yugoslav intelligence elements seeking to provoke a crisis against Austro-Hungary. And there are more extreme claims that the ultimate manipulators here were agents of a world-wide conspiracy, of international Jewry or freemasonry seeking to bring about war. We are fully warranted in adopting the first conspiratorial explanation, but perhaps only partially warranted in thinking there is anything in the second claim[3], while the extreme claims seem to me to be as unwarranted as anything could be.

 

What we require, then, is some definition which will mark off the kind of features which ought to lead us to suspect the warrant of any particular conspiratorial explanation. Keeley lays out a series of these, which I shall list and comment upon. But first he offers his definition of conspiracy theories in general:

A conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of some historical event (or events) in terms of the significant causal agency of a relatively small group of persons—the conspirators—acting in secret… a conspiracy theory deserves the appellation “theory” because it proffers an explanation of the event in question. It proposes reasons why the event occurred… [it] need not propose that the conspirators are all powerful, only that they have played some pivotal role in bringing about the event… indeed, it is because the conspirators are not omnipotent that they must act in secret, for if they acted in public, others would move to obstruct them… [and] the group of conspirators must be small, although the upper bounds are necessarily vague.(116)

Keeley’s definition here differs significantly from the kind of conspiracy at which Popper was aiming in The Open Society, crude Marxist explanations of events in terms of capitalist manipulation. For one can assume that in capitalist societies capitalists are very nearly all-powerful and not generally hindered by the necessity for secrecy.

 

A greater problem for Keeley’s definition, though, is that it seems to include much of the work of central government. Indeed, it seems to define exactly the operations of cabinet government—more so in countries like Britain with no great tradition of governmental openness than in many other democracies. What is clearly lacking here is some additional feature, that the conspirators be acting against the law or against the public interest, or both. This doesn’t entirely free government from accusations of conspiracy—does a secret cabinet decision to upgrade a country’s nuclear armaments which appears prima facie within the bounds of the law of that country but may breach international laws and agreements count? Is it lawful? In the public interest?

 

A further difficulty with some kind of illegality constraint is that it might tend to rule out what we might otherwise clearly recognise as conspiracy theories. Take, for instance, the widely held belief amongst ufologists that the US government (and others) has acted to conceal the existence on earth of extra-terrestrial creatures, crashed flying saucers at Roswell, and so on. It doesn’t seem obvious that governments would be acting illegally in this case—national security legislation is often open to very wide interpretation—and it could be argued that they are acting in the public interest, to avoid panic and so on. (Unless, of course, as some ufologists seem to believe, the government is conspiring with the aliens in order to organise the slavery of the human race!) So we have here what would appear to be a conspiracy theory, and one which has some of the features of Keeley’s UCTs, but which is excluded by the illegality constraint. Perhaps the best we can do here is to assert that conspiracy theories are necessarily somewhat vague in this regard; I’ll return to this point later.

 

If this gives us a rough idea of what counts as a conspiracy theory, we can then build upon it and Keeley goes on to list five features which he regards as characteristic of Unwarranted Conspiracy Theories:

 

            (1) ‘A UCT is an explanation that runs counter to some received, official, or “obvious” account.’ (116-7) This is nothing like a sufficient condition, for the history of even democratic governments is full of post facto surprises that cause us to revise previous official explanations. For instance, for many years the official explanation for Britain’s military success in the Second World War was made in terms of superior generalship, better troops, occasional good luck, and so on. The revelation in the 1970s of the successful Enigma programme to break German service codes necessitated wholesale revision of military histories of this period. This was an entirely beneficial outcome, but others were more dubious. The growth of nuclear power in Britain in the 1950s was officially explained in terms of the benefit of cheaper and less polluting sources of electricity. It was only much later that it became clear that these claims were exaggerated and that the true motivation for the construction of these reactors was to provide fissile material for Britain’s independent nuclear weapons. Whether such behaviour was either legal or in the public interest is an interesting thought.

 

            (1A) ‘Central to any UCT is an official story that the conspiracy theory must undermine and cast doubt upon. Furthermore, the presence of a “cover story” is often seen as the most damning piece of evidence for any given conspiracy.” This is an interesting epistemological point to which I shall return.

 

            (2) ‘The true intentions behind the conspiracy are invariably nefarious’. I agree with this as a general feature, particularly of non-governmental conspiracies, though as pointed out above it is possible for governmental conspiracies to be motivated or justified in terms of preventing public alarm, which may be seen as an essentially beneficial aim.

 

            (3) ‘UCTs typically seek to tie together seemingly unrelated events.’ This is certainly true of the more extreme conspiracy theory, one which seeks a grand unified explanation of everything. We have here a progression from the individual CT, seeking to explain one event, to the more general. Carl Oglesby (1976), for instance, seeks to reinterpret many of the key events in post-war American history in terms of a more or less secret war between opposing factions within American capital, an explanation which sees Watergate and the removal of Richard Nixon from office as one side’s revenge for the assassination of John Kennedy. At the extreme we have those theories which seek to explain all the key events of western history in terms of a single secret motivating force, something like international freemasonry or the great Jewish conspiracy.[4] It may be taken as a useful rule of thumb here that the greater the explanatory range of the CT, the more likely it is to be untrue. (A point to which Popper himself would be sympathetic!)

 

Finally, one might want to query here Keeley’s point about seemingly unrelated events. Many CTs seem to have their origin in a desire to relate events that one might feel ought to go together. Thus many Americans, on hearing of the assassination of Robert Kennedy (itself coming very shortly after that of Martin Luther King) thought these events obviously related in some way, and sought to generate theories linking them in terms of some malevolent force bent on eliminating apparently liberal influences in American politics. They seem prima facie more likely to be related than, say, the deaths of the Kennedy brothers and those of John Lennon or Elvis Presley: any CT linking these does indeed fulfil Keeley’s (3).

 

            (4) ‘…the truths behind events explained by conspiracy theories are typically well-guarded secrets, even if the ultimate perpetrators are sometimes well-known public figures.’ This is certainly the original belief of proponents of UCTs but it does lead to a somewhat paradoxical situation whereby the alleged secret can become something of an orthodoxy. Thus opinion polls seem to indicate that something in excess of 80% of Americans believe that a conspiracy led to the death of President Kennedy, though it seems wildly unlikely that they all believe in the same conspiracy. It becomes increasingly hard to believe in a well-guarded secret that has been so thoroughly aired in 35 years of books, magazine articles and even Hollywood movies.

 

Pretty much the same percentage of Americans seem to believe in the presence on earth of extra-terrestrials, though whether this tells us more about Americans or about opinion-polls is hard to say. But these facts, if facts they be, would tend to undercut the ‘benevolent government’ UCTs. For there is really no point in ‘them’ keeping the truth from us to avoid panic if most of us already believe this ‘truth’. The revelation of cast-iron evidence of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy or of the reality of alien visits to Earth would be unlikely to generate more than a ripple of public interest, these events having been so thoroughly rehearsed.

 

            (5) ‘The chief tool of the conspiracy theorist is what I shall call errant data’. By which Keeley means data which is unaccounted for by official explanations, or data which if true would tend to contradict official explanations.

 

These are the marks of the UCT. As Keeley goes on to say (118) ‘there is no criterion or set of criteria that provide a priori grounds for distinguishing warranted conspiracy theories from UCTs.’ One might perhaps like to insist here that UCTs ought to be false, and this is why we are not warranted in believing them, but it is in the nature of many CTs that they cannot be falsified. The best we may do is show why the warrant for believing them is so poor. And one way of approaching this is by way of examining where the thinking that leads to UCTs goes awry.

 

3. Where CT thinking goes wrong

 

It is my belief that one reason why we should not accept UCTs is because they are irrational. But by this I do not necessarily mean that they are illogical in the sense that they commit logical fallacies or use invalid argument forms—though this does indeed sometimes happen—but rather that they misuse or fail to use a range of critical thinking skills and principles of reasoning. In this section I want to provide a list of what I regard as the key weaknesses of CT thinking, and then in the next section I will examine a case study of (what I regard to be) a UCT and show how these weaknesses operate. My list of points is not necessarily in order of importance.

 

            (A) An inability to weigh evidence properly. Different sorts of evidence are generally worthy of different amounts of weight. Of crucial importance here is eye-witness testimony. Considerable psychological research has been done into the strengths and weaknesses of such testimony, and this has been distilled into one of the key critical thinking texts, Norris & King’s (1983) Test on Appraising Observations whose Manual provides a detailed set of principles for judging the believability of observation statements. I suspect that no single factor contributes more, especially to assassination and UFO UCTs, than a failure to absorb and apply these principles.

 

            (B) An inability to assess evidence corruption and contamination. This is a particular problem with eyewitness testimony about an event that is subsequently the subject of considerable media coverage. And it is not helped by conventions or media events which bring such witnesses together to discuss their experiences—it is not for nothing that most court systems insist that witnesses do not discuss their testimony with each other or other people until after it has been given in court. There is a particular problem with American UCTs since the mass media there are not governed by sub judice constraints, and so conspiratorial theories can be widely aired in advance of any court proceedings. Again Norris & King’s principles (particularly IV. 10 & 12) should warn against this.[5] But we do not need considerable delay for such corruption to occur: it may happen as part of the original act of perception. For instance, in reading accounts where a group of witnesses claim to have identified some phenomenon in the sky as a spaceship or other unknown form of craft, I often wonder if this judgement occurred to all of them simultaneously, or if a claim by one witness that this was a spaceship could not act to corrupt the judgmental powers of other witnesses, so that they started to see this phenomenon ‘as’ a spacecraft in preference to some more mundane explanation.

 

            (C) Misuse or outright reversal of a principle of charity: wherever the evidence is insufficient to decide between a mundane explanation and a suspicious one, UCTs tend to pick the latter. The critical thinker should never be prejudiced against occupying a position of principled neutrality when the evidence is more or less equally balanced between two competing hypotheses. And I would argue that there is much to be said for operating some principle of charity here, of always picking the less suspicious hypothesis of two equally supported by the evidence. My suspicion is that in the long run this would lead to a generally more economical belief structure, that reversing the principle of charity ultimately tends to blunt Occam’s Razor, but I cannot hope to prove this.

 

            (D) The demonisation of persons and organisations. This may be regarded as either following from or being a special case of (C). Broadly, this amounts to moving from the accepted fact that X once lied to the belief that nothing X says is trustworthy, or taking the fact that X once performed some misdeed as particular evidence of guilt on other occasions. In the former case, adopting (D) would demonise us all, since we have lied on some occasion or other. This is especially problematic for UCTs involving government organisations or personnel, since all governments reserve the right to lie or mislead if they feel it is in the national interest to do so. But proof that any agency lied about one event ought not to be taken as significant proof that they lied on some other occasion. It goes against the character of the witness, as lawyers are wont to say, but then no sensible person should believe that governments are perfectly truthful.

 

The second case is more difficult. It is a standard feature of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that the fact that X has a previous conviction should not be given in evidence against them, nor revealed to the jury until after a verdict is arrived at. The reasoning here is that generally evidence of X’s previous guilt is not specific evidence for his guilt on the present occasion; it is possible for it to be the case that X was guilty then and is innocent now, and so the court should not be prejudiced against him. But there is an exception to this, at least in English law, where there are significant individual features shared between X’s previous proven modus operandi and that of the present offence under consideration; evidence of a consistent pattern may be introduced into court. But, the rigid standards of courtroom proof aside, it is not unreasonable for the police to suspect X on the basis of his earlier conviction. This may not be fair to X (if he is trying to go straight) but it is epistemologically reasonable. The trouble for UCTs, as we shall see, is that most governments have a long record of previous convictions, and the true UC theorist may regard this not just as grounds for a reasonable suspicion but as itself evidence of present guilt.

 

            (E) The canonisation of persons or (more rarely) organisations. This may be regarded as the mirror-image of (D). Here those who are regarded as the victims of some set of events being explained conspiratorially tend to be presented, for the purpose of justifying the explanation, as being without sin, or being more heroic or more threatening to some alleged set of private interests than the evidence might reasonably support.

 

            (F) An inability to make rational or proportional means-end judgements. This is perhaps the greatest affront to Occam’s Razor that one finds in UCTs. Such theories are often propounded with the explanation that some group of conspirators have been acting in furtherance of some aim or in order to prevent some action taking place. But one ought to ask whether such a group of conspirators were in a position to further their aim in some easier or less expensive or less risky fashion. Our assumption here is not the principle of charity mentioned in (C) above, that our alleged conspirators are too nice or moral to resort to nefarious activities. We should assume only that our conspirators are rational people capable of working out the best means to a particular end. This is a defeasible assumption—stupidity is not totally unknown in the political world—but it is nevertheless an assumption that ought to guide us unless we have evidence to the contrary.

 

A difficulty that should be mentioned here is that of establishing the end at which the conspiracy is aimed, made more difficult for conspiracies that never subsequently announce these things. For the state of affairs brought about by the conspirators may, despite their best efforts, not be that at which they aimed. If this is what happens then making a rational means-end judgement to the actual result of the conspiracy may be a very different matter from doing the same thing to the intended results.

 

            (G) Evidence against a UCT is always evidence for. This is perhaps the point that would most have irritated Karl Popper with his insistence that valid theories must always be capable of falsification. But it is an essential feature of UCTs; they do not just argue that on the evidence available a different conclusion should be drawn from that officially sanctioned or popular. Rather, the claim is that the evidence supporting the official verdict is suspect, fraudulent, faked or coerced. And this belief is used to support the nature of the conspiracy, which must be one powerful or competent enough to fake all this evidence. What we have here is a difference between critically assessing evidence—something I support under (A) above—and the universal acid of hypercritical doubt. For if we start with the position that any piece of evidence may be false then it is open to us to support any hypothesis whatsoever. Holocaust revisionists would have us believe that vast amounts of evidence supporting the hypothesis of a German plot to exterminate Europe’s Jews are fake. As Robert Anton Wilson (1989: 172) says, ‘a conspiracy that can deceive us about 6,000,000 deaths can deceive us about anything, and that it takes a great leap of faith for Holocaust Revisionists to believe that World War II happened at all.’ Quite so. What is needed here is that I might term meta-evidence, evidence about the evidence. My claim would be that the only way to keep Occam’s Razor shiny here is to insist on two different levels of critical analysis of evidence. Evidence may be rejected if it doesn’t fit a plausible hypothesis—this is what everyone must do in cases where there is apparently contradictory evidence, and there can be no prima facie guidelines for rejection here apart from overall epistemological economy. But evidence may only be impeached—accused of being deliberately faked, forged, coerced, etc.—if we have further evidence of this forgery: that a piece of evidence does not fit our present hypothesis is not by itself any warrant for believing that the evidence is fake.

 

            (H) We should put no trust in what I here term the fallacy of the spider’s web. That A knows B and that B knows C is no evidence at all that A has even heard of C. But all too often UCTs proceed in this fashion, weaving together a web of conspirators on the basis of who knows who. But personal acquaintance is not necessarily a transitive relation. The falsity of this belief in the epistemological importance of webs of relationships can be demonstrated with reference to the show-business party game known sometimes as ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’. The object of the game is to select the name of an actor or actress and then link them to the film-actor Kevin Bacon through no more than six shared appearances. (E.g. A appeared with B in film X, B appeared with C in film Y, C appeared with D in film Z, and D appears in Kevin Bacon’s latest movie: thus we link A to Bacon in four moves.) The plain fact is that most of us know many people, and important people in public office tend to have dealings with a huge number of people, so just about anybody in the world can be linked to somebody else in a reasonably small number of such links.

 

I can demonstrate the truth of this proposition with reference to my own case, that of a dull and unworldly person who doesn’t get out much. For I am separated by only two degrees from Her Majesty The Queen (for I once very briefly met the then Poet Laureate, who must himself have met the Queen if only at his inauguration) which means I am separated by only three degrees from all the many important political figures that the Queen herself has met, including names like Churchill and De Gaulle. Which further means that only four degrees separate me from Josef Stalin (met by Churchill at Yalta) and just five degrees from Adolf Hitler (who never met Churchill but did meet prewar Conservative politicians like Chamberlain and Halifax who were known to Churchill). Given the increasing amounts of travel and communication that have taken place in this century, it should be possible to connect me with just about anybody in the world in the requisite six stages. But so what? Connections like these offer the possibility of communication and influence, but offer no evidence for its actuality.

 

            (I) The classic logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. This is the most common strictly logical fallacy to be found in political conspiracy theories, especially those dealing with assassinations and suspicious deaths. And broadly it takes the shape of claiming that since event X happened after the death of A, A’s death was brought about in order to cause or facilitate the occurrence of X. The First World War happened after the death of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and there is clearly a sense in which it happened because of his death: there is a causal chain leading from the death to Austrian outrage, to a series of Austrian demands upon Serbia, culminating in Austria’s declaration of war against Serbia, Russia’s declaration against Austria, and, via a series of interlinked treaty obligations, most of the nations of Europe ending up at war with one another. Though these effects of the assassination may now appear obvious, one problem for the CT proponent is that hindsight clarifies these matters enormously: such a progression may not have been at all obvious to the people involved in these events at the time. And it is even harder to believe that bringing about such an outcome was in any of their interests. (Austria plainly had an interest in shoring up its authority in the Balkans but not, given its many structural weaknesses, in engaging in a long and destructive war. The outcome, which anyone might have predicted as likely, was the economic ruin and subsequent political dissolution of the entire Austro-Hungarian empire.)

 

Attempting to judge the rationality of a proposed CT here as an explanation for some such set of events runs into two problems. Firstly, though an outcome may now seem obvious to us, it may not have appeared so obvious to people at the time, either in its nature or in its expensiveness. Thus there may well have been people who thought that assassinating Franz Ferdinand in order to trigger a crisis in relations between Austria and Serbia was a sensible policy move, precisely because they did not anticipate a general world war occurring as a result and may have thought a less expensive conflict, a limited war of independence between Serbia and Austria, worth the possible outcome of freeing more of the Balkans from Austrian domination. And secondly, if we cannot attribute hindsight to the actors in such events, neither can we ascribe to them a perfect level of rationality: it is always possible for people engaged in such actions to possess a poor standard of means-end judgement.

 

But, bearing these caveats in mind, one might still wish to propound two broad principles here for distinguishing whether an event is a genuine possible motive for an earlier conspiracy or just an instance of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Firstly, could any possible conspirators, with the knowledge they possessed at the time, have reasonably foreseen such an outcome? And secondly, granted that such an outcome could have been desired, are the proposed conspiratorial events a rational method of bringing about such an outcome? That a proposed CT passes these tests is, of course, no guarantee that we are dealing here with a genuine conspiracy; but a failure to pass them is a significant indicator of an unwarranted CT.

 

4. A case-study of CT thinking—the assassination of President Kennedy

 

With these diagnostic indicators of poor critical thinking in place, I would now like to apply them to a typical instance of CT (and, to my mind, unwarranted CT) thinking.[6] On 22 November, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Two days later, the man accused of his murder, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself murdered in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters. These two events (and perhaps particularly the second, coming as it did so rapidly after the first) led to a number of accusations that Kennedy’s death had been the result of a conspiracy of which Oswald may or not have been a part. Books propounding such theories emerged even before the Warren Commission issued its report on the assassination in August 1964. Writing at this time in his essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ the political scientist Richard Hofstadter could say; “Conspiratorial explanations of Kennedy’s assassination have a far wider currency in Europe than they do in the United States.” (Hofstadter 1964: 9) Hofstadter’s view of the American paranoid style was one of small cults of a right-wing or racist or anti-Catholic or anti-Freemason bent whose descendants are still to be found in the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, the Michigan Militia, etc.. But within a couple of years of the emergence of the Warren Report and, more importantly, its 26 volumes of evidence, a new style of conspiratorial thinking emerged. While some right-wing conspiratorial theories remained[7], the bulk of the conspiracy theories propounded to explain the assassination adopted a position from the left of centre, accusing or assuming that some conspiracy of right-wing elements and/or some part of the US Government itself had been responsible for the assassination.

 

A complete classification of such CTs is not necessary here[8], but I ought perhaps to point to a philosophically interesting development in the case. As a result of public pressure resulting from the first wave of CT literature, a congressional committee was established in 1977 to investigate Kennedy’s assassination; it instituted a thorough examination of the available evidence and was on the verge of producing a report endorsing the Warren Commission’s conclusions when it discovered what was alleged to be a sound recording of the actual assassination. Almost solely on the basis of this evidence—which was subsequently discredited by a scientific panel put together by the Department of Justice—the Congressional committee decided that there had probably been a conspiracy, asserting on the basis of very little evidence that the Mafia was the most probable source of this conspiracy. What was significant about this congressional investigation was the effect its thorough investigation of the forensic and photographic evidence in the case had. Many of the alleged discrepancies in this evidence, which had formed the basis for the many calls to establish such an investigation, were shown to be erroneous. This did not lead to the refutation of CTs but rather to a new development: the balance of CT claims now went from arguing that there existed evidence supporting a conspiratorial explanation to arguing that all or most of the evidence supporting the lone-assassin hypothesis had been faked, a new level of epistemological complexity.

 

A representative CT of this type was propounded in Oliver Stone’s hit 1992 Hollywood film JFK .[9] It asserts that a coalition of interests within the US governmental structure, including senior members of the armed forces, FBI, CIA, Secret Service and various Texas law-enforcement agencies, together with the assistance of members of organised crime, conspired to arrange the assassination of President Kennedy and the subsequent framing of an unwitting or entirely innocent Oswald for the crime. Motives for the assassination vary but most such CTs now agree on such motives as (a) preventing Kennedy after his supposed re-election from reversing US involvement in Vietnam, (b) protecting right-wing industrial interests, especially Texan oil interests, from what were regarded as possible depredations by the Kennedy administration, (c) instigating another and more successful US invasion of Cuba, and (d) halting the judicial assault waged by the Kennedy administration under Attorney General Robert Kennedy against the interests of organised crime.

 

Such a CT scores highly on Keeley’s five characteristic features of Unwarranted Conspiracy Theories outlined above. It runs counter to the official explanation of the assassination, though it has now itself become something of a popular orthodoxy, one apparently subscribed to by a majority of the American population. The alleged intentions behind the conspiracy are indeed nefarious, using the murder of a democratically-elected leader to further the interests of a private cabal. And it does seem to seek to tie together seemingly unrelated events. The most obvious of these is in terms of the assassination’s alleged motive: it seeks to link the assassination with the subsequent history of America’s involvement in Vietnam. But a number of other connections are made at other levels of explanation. For instance, the deaths of various people connected in one way or another with the assassination are linked together as being in some way related to the continuing cover-up by the conspirators. Keeley’s fourth claim, that the truth behind an event being explained by a UCT be a typically well-guarded secret is, as I pointed out above, much harder to justify now in a climate where most people apparently believe in the existence of such a conspiracy. But Keeley’s fifth claim, that the chief tool here is errant data, remains true. The vast body of published evidence on the assassination has been picked over with remarkable care for signs of discrepancy and contradiction, signs which are regarded as providing the strongest evidence for such a conspiracy. What now seems to me to be an interesting development in these more paranoid UCTs, as I mention above, is the extent to which unerrant data is now regarded as a major feature of such conspiracy theories.

 

But how do these Kennedy assassination CTs rate against my own list of what I regard as critical thinking weaknesses?

 

            (A) An inability to weigh evidence properly. Here they score highly. Of particular importance is the inability to judge the reliability or lack thereof of eyewitness testimony, and an unwillingness or inability to discard evidence which does not fit.

 

On the first point, most Kennedy CTs place high reliance on the small number of people who claimed at the time (and the somewhat larger number who claim now—see point (B) below) that they heard more than three shots fired in Dealey Plaza or that they heard shots fired from some other location than the Book Depository, both claims that if true would rule out the possibility of Oswald’s acting alone. Since the overwhelming number of witnesses whose opinions have been registered did not hear more than three shots, and tended to locate the origin of these shots in the general direction of the Depository (which, in an acoustically misleadingly arena like Dealey Plaza is perhaps the best that could be hoped for), the economical explanation is to assume, unless further evidence arises, that the minority here are mistaken. Since the assassination was an unexpected, rapid and emotionally laden event—all key features for weakening the reliability of observation, according to the Principles of Appraising Observations in Norris & King (1983), it is only to be expected that there would be a significant portion of inconsistent testimony. The wonder here is that there is such a high degree of agreement over the basic facts.

 

We find a similar misuse of observational principles in conspiratorial interpretations of the subsequent murder of Police Officer Tippit, where the majority of witnesses who clearly identified Oswald as the killer are downplayed in favour of the minority of witnesses—some at a considerable distance and all considerably surprised by the events unfolding in front of them—who gave descriptions of the assailant which did not match Oswald. Experienced police officers are used to eye-witness testimony of sudden and dramatic events varying considerably and, like all researchers faced with a large body of evidence containing discrepancies, must discard some evidence as worthless. Since Oswald was tracked almost continuously from the scene of Tippit’s shooting to the site of his own arrest, and since forensic evidence linked the revolver found on Oswald to the shooting, the most economical explanation again is that the majority of witnesses were right in their identification of Oswald and the minority were mistaken.

 

This problem of being unable to discard errant data is central to the creation of CTs since, as Keeley says:

The role of errant data in UCTs is critical. The typical logic of a UCT goes something like this: begin with errant facts.... The official story all but ignores this data. What can explain the intransigence of the official story tellers in the face of this and other contravening evidence? Could they be so stupid and blind? Of course not; they must be intentionally ignoring it. The best explanation is some kind of conspiracy, an intentional attempt to hide the truth of the matter from the public eye. (Keeley 1999: 199)

Such a view in the Kennedy case ignores the fact that the overwhelming amount of errant data on which CTs have been constructed, far from being hidden, was openly published in the 26 volumes of Warren Commission evidence. This has led to accusations that it was ‘hidden in plain view’, but one can’t help feeling that a more efficient conspiracy would have suppressed such inconvenient data in the first place.

 

The standard position that errant data is likely to be false, that eye-witness testimony and memory is sometimes unreliable, that persisting pieces of physical evidence are preferable, etc., in short that Occam’s Razor will insist on cutting and throwing away some of the data is constantly rejected in Kennedy CT literature. Perhaps the most extravagant example of this, amounting almost to a Hegelian synthesis of assassination conspiracy theories, is Lifton (1980). Seeking to reconcile the major body of testimony that Kennedy was shot from behind with a small body of errant data that he possessed a wound in the front of his body, the author dedicates over 600 pages to the construction of the most baroque conspiracy theory imaginable. In Lifton’s thesis, Kennedy was shot solely from the front, and then the conspirators gained access to his body during its journey back to Washington and were able to doctor it so that at the subsequent post mortem examination it showed signs of being shot only from the rear. Thus the official medical finding that Kennedy was only shot from the rear can be reconciled with the general CT belief that he was shot from the front (too) in a theory that seems to show that everybody is right.

 

Apart from the massive complication of such a plan—clearly going against my point (F)—and its medical implausibility, such a thesis actually reverses Occam’s Razor by creating more errant data than there was to start with. For if Kennedy was shot only from the front, we now need some explanation for why the great majority of over 400 witnesses at the scene believed that the shots were coming from behind him! And this challenge is one that is ducked by the great majority of CTs: if minority errant data is to be preferred as reliable, then we require some explanation for the presence of the majority data now being rejected.

 

But Lifton at least got one thing right. In accounting for the title of his book he writes:

The “best evidence” concept, impressed on all law students, is that when you seek to determine a fact from conflicting data, you must arrange the data according to a hierarchy of reliability. All data are not equal. Some evidence (e.g. physical evidence, or a scientific report) is more inherently error-free, and hence more reliable, than other evidence (e.g. an eye-witness account). The “best” evidence rules the conclusion, whatever volume of contrary evidence there may be in the lower categories.[10]

Unfortunately Lifton takes this to mean that conspirators who were able to decide the nature of the autopsy evidence would thereby lay down a standard for judging or rejecting as incompatible the accompanying eye-witness testimony. But given the high degree of unanimity among eye-witnesses on this occasion, and given the existence of corroborating physical evidence (a rifle and cartridges forensically linked to the assassination were found in the Depository behind Kennedy, the registered owner of the rifle was a Depository employee, etc.), all that the alleged body-tampering could hope to achieve is make the overall body of evidence more suspicious because more contradictory. Only if the body of reliable evidence was more or less balanced between a conspiratorial and non-conspiratorial explanation could this difficulty be avoided. But it is surely over-estimating the powers, predictive and practical, of such a conspiracy that they could hope to guarantee this situation beforehand.

 

            (B) An inability to assess evidence corruption and contamination. Though, as I note above, such contamination of eye-witness testimony may occur contemporaneously, it is a particular problem for the more long-standing CTs. In the Kennedy case, many witnesses of the assassination who at the time gave accounts broadly consistent with the explanation have subsequently amended or extended their accounts to include material that isn’t so consistent. Witnesses, for instance, who at the time located all the shots as coming from the Book Depository subsequently gave accounts in which they located shots from other directions, most notably the notorious ‘grassy knoll’, or later told of activity on the knoll which they never mentioned in their original statements. (Posner (1993) charts a number of these changes in testimony.)

 

What is interesting about many of these accounts is that mundane explanations for these changes—I later remembered that..., I forgot to mention that...—tend to be eschewed in favour of more conspiratorial explanations. Such witnesses may deny that the signed statements made at the time accurately reflect what they told the authorities, or may say that the person interviewing them wasn’t interested in writing down anything that didn’t cohere with the official explanation of the assassination, and so on. Such explanations face serious difficulties. For one thing, since many of these statements were taken on the day of the assassination or very shortly afterwards, it would have to be assumed that putative conspirators already knew which facts would cohere with an official explanation and which wouldn’t, which may imply an implausible degree of foreknowledge. A more serious problem is that these statements were taken by low-level members of the various investigatory bodies, police, FBI, Secret Service, etc.; to assert that such statements were manipulated by these people entails that they were members of the conspiracy. And this runs up against a practical problem for mounting conspiracies, that the more people who are in a conspiracy, the harder it is going to be to enforce security.

 

A more plausible explanation for these changes in testimony might be that witnesses who provided testimony broadly supportive of the official non-conspiratorial explanation subsequently came into contact with some of the enormous quantity of media coverage suggesting less orthodox explanations and, consciously or unconsciously, have adjusted their recollections accordingly. The likelihood of such things happening after a sufficiently thorough exposure to alternative explanations may underlie Norris & King’s principle II.1:

An observation statement tends to be believable to the extent that the observer was not exposed, after the event, to further information relevant to describing it. (If the observer was exposed to such information, the statement is believable to the extent that the exposure took place close to the time of the event described.)[11]

Their parenthesised time principle clearly renders a good deal of more recent Kennedy eye-witness testimony dubious after three and a half decades of exposure to vast amounts of further information in the mass media, not helped by ‘assassination conferences’ where eye-witnesses have met and spoken with each other.

 

One outcome of these two points is that, in the unlikely event of some living person being seriously suspected of involvement in the assassination, a criminal trial would be rendered difficult if not impossible. Such are the published discrepancies now within and between witnesses’ testimonies that there would be enormous difficulties in attempting to render a plausibly consistent defence or prosecution narrative on their basis.

 

            (C) Misuse or outright reversal of a principle of charity. Where an event may have either a suspicious or an innocent explanation, and there is no significant evidence to decide between them, CTs invariably opt for the suspicious explanation. In part this is due to a feature deriving from Keeley’s point (3) above, about CTs seeking to tie together seemingly unrelated events, but perhaps taken to a new level. Major CTs seek a maximally explanatory hypothesis, one which accounts for all of the events within its domain, and so they leave no room for the out of the ordinary event, the unlikely, the accident, which has no connection whatsoever with the conspiratorial events being hypothesised. The various Kennedy conspiracy narratives contain a large number of these events dragooned into action on the assumption that no odd event could have an innocent explanation. There is no better example of this than the Umbrella Man, a character whose forcible inclusion in conspiratorial explanations demonstrates well how a determined attempt to maintain this reversed principle of charity may lead to the most remarkable deformities of rational explanation.

 

When pictorial coverage of the assassination entered the public domain, in newspaper photographs within the next few days, and more prominently in still from the Zapruder movie film of the events subsequently published in LIFE magazine, it became clear that one of the closest bystanders to the presidential limousine was a man holding a raised umbrella, and this at a time when it was clearly not raining. This odd figure rapidly became the focus of a number of conspiratorial hypotheses. Perhaps the most extreme of these originates with Robert Cutler (1975). According to Cutler, the Umbrella Man had a weapon concealed with the umbrella enabling him to fire a dart or flechette, perhaps drugged, into the president’s neck, possibly for the purpose of immobilising him while the other assassins did their work. The only actual evidence to support this hypothesis is that the front of Kennedy’s neck did indeed possess a small punctate wound, described by the medical team treating him as probably a wound of entrance but clearly explainable in the light of the full body of forensic evidence as a wound of exit for a bullet fired from above and behind the presidential motorcade. Consistent, in other words, with being the work of Oswald.

 

There is no other supportive evidence for Cutler’s hypothesis. (Cutler, of course, explains this in terms of the conspirators being able to control the subsequent autopsy and so conceal any awkward evidence; he thus complies with my principle (G) below.) More importantly, it seems inherently unlikely on other grounds. Since the Umbrella Man was standing on the public sidewalk, right next to a number of ordinary members of the public and in plain view of hundreds of witnesses, many of whom would have been looking at him precisely because he was so close to the president, its seems unlikely that a conspiracy could guarantee that he could get away with his lethal behaviour without being noticed by someone. And the proposed explanation for all this rigmarole, the stunning of the target, is entirely unnecessary: most firearms experts agree that the president was a pretty easy target unstunned.

 

If Cutler’s explanation hasn’t found general favour with the conspiracy community, another has, but this too has equally strange effects upon reasoning clearly. The first version of this theory has the Umbrella Man signalling the presence of the target—movie-film of the assassination clearly shows that the raised umbrella is being waved or shaken. This hypothesis seems to indicate that the conspiracy had hired assassins who couldn’t be relied upon to recognise the President of the United States when they saw him seated in his presidential limousine—the one with the president’s flag on—next to the most recognisable first lady in American history.

 

An apparently more plausible hypothesis is that it is the Umbrella Man who gives the signal for the team of assassins to open fire. (A version of this hypothesis can still be seen as late as 1992 in the movie JFK.) What I find remarkable here is that nobody seems to have thought this theory through at all. Firstly, the Umbrella Man is clearly on the sidewalk a few feet from the president while our alleged assassins are located high up in the Book Depository, in neighbouring buildings, or on top of the grassy knoll way to the front of the president. How, then, can he know what they can see from their different positions? How can he tell from his location that they now have clear shots at the target? (Dealey Plaza is full of trees, road signs and other obstructions, not to mention large numbers of police officers and members of the public who might be expected to get in the way of a clear view here.) And secondly, such an explanation actually weakens the efficiency of the alleged assassination conspiracy. (Here my limited boyhood experience of firing an air-rifle with telescopic sights finally comes in handy!) In order to make sense of the Umbrella Man as signaller, something like the following sequence of events must occur. Each rifleman focuses upon the presidential target through his telescopic sight, tracking the target as it moves at some ten to twelve miles per hour. Given the very narrow focus of such sights, he cannot see the Umbrella Man. To witness the signal, he must keep taking his eye away from the telescopic sight, refocussing it until he can see the distant figure on the sidewalk, and when the signal is given, put his eye back to the sight, re-focus again, re-adjust the position of the rifle since the target has continued to move while he was not looking at it, and then fire. This is not an efficient recipe for accurate target-shooting.

 

Oliver Stone eliminates some of these problems in the version he depicts in the movie JFK. Here each of his three snipers is accompanied by a spotter, equipped with walkie-talkie and binoculars. While the sniper focuses on the target, the spotter looks out for the signal from the Umbrella Man and then orally communicates the order to open fire. But now, given what I have already said about the problem with the Umbrella Man’s location, it is hard to see what purpose he serves that could not be better served by the spotters. He drops out of the equation. He is, as Wittgenstein says somewhere, a wheel that spins freely because it is not connected to the rest of the machinery. Occam’s Razor would cut him from the picture, but Occam is no firm favourite of UCT proponents.

 

In 1978, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations held public hearings on the Kennedy case, a Mr. Louis de Witt came forward to confess to being the Umbrella Man. He claimed that he came to Dealey Plaza in order to barrack the president as he went past, and that he was carrying a raised umbrella because he had heard that, perhaps for some obscure reason connected with the president’s father’s stay in London as US Ambassador during the war, the Kennedy family has a thing about umbrellas. De Witt hadn’t come forward in the 15 years since the assassination since he had had no idea about the proposed role of the Umbrella man in the case. This part of his explanation seems to me to be eminently plausible: those of us with an obsessive interest in current affairs find it hard to grasp just how many people never read the papers or watch TV news. There is something almost endearing about de Witt, an odd character whose moment of public eccentricity seems to have enmired him in decades of conspiratorial hypotheses without his realising it.

 

Needless to say, conspiracy theorists did not accept de Witt’s testimony at face value. Some argued that he was a stooge put forward by the authorities to head off investigation into the real Umbrella Man, others that de Witt himself must be lying to conceal a more sinister role in these events, though I know of no evidence to support either of these conclusions. What this story makes clear is that an unwillingness to abandon discrepant events as unrelated, an unwillingness to abandon this reverse principle of charity here whereby all such events are conspiratorial unless clearly proven otherwise, rapidly leads to remarkable mental gymnastics, to hypotheses that are excessively complex and even internally inconsistent, (The Umbrella Man as signaller makes the assassination harder to perform.) But, such are the ways of human psychology, once such an event has been firmly embedded within a sufficiently complex hypothesis, no amount of contradictory evidence would seem to be able to shift it. The Umbrella Man has by now been invested with such importance as to become one of the great myths of the assassination, against which mere evidentiary matters can have no effect.

 

            (D) The demonisation of persons and organisations. This weakness takes a number of forms in the Kennedy case, which I shall treat separately.

 

(i) Guilt by reputation. The move from the fact that some body—the FBI, the CIA, the mafia, the KGB—has a proven record of wrong-doing in the past to the claim that they were capable of wrong-doing in the present case doesn’t seem unreasonable. But the stronger claim that past wrong-doing is in some sense evidence for present guilt is much more problematic, particularly when differences between the situations are overlooked. This is especially true of the role of the CIA in Kennedy CTs.

 

Senator Church’s 1976 congressional investigation into the activities of US intelligence agencies provided clear evidence that in the period 1960-63 elements of the CIA, probably under the instructions of or at least with the knowledge of the White House, had conspired with Cuban exiles and members of organised crime to attempt the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Evidence also emerged of CIA involvement in the deaths of other foreign leaders—Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Lumumba in the Congo, etc.. These findings were incorporated in Kennedy CTs as evidence to support the probability that the CIA, or at least certain members of it, were also responsible for the death of Kennedy. Once an assassin, always an assassin? Such an argument neglects the fact that the CIA could reasonably believe that they were acting in US interests, possibly lawfully since they were acting under the guidance or instruction of the White House. This belief is not open to them in the case of killing their own president, a manifestly unlawful act and one hard to square with forwarding US interests. (Evidence that Soldier X willingly shoots at the soldiers of other countries when ordered to do so is no evidence that he would shoot at soldiers of his own country, with or without orders. The situations are plainly different.) At best the Church Committee evidence indicated that the CIA had the capacity to organise assassinations, not that it had either the willingness or the reason to assassinate its own leader.

 

(ii) Guilt by association. This takes the form of impeaching the credibility of any member of a guilty organisation. Since both the FBI and the CIA (not to mention, of course, the KGB or the mafia) had proven track records of serious misbehaviour in this period, it is assumed that all members of these organisations, and all their activities, are equally guilty. Thus the testimony of an FBI agent can be impeached solely on the grounds that he is an FBI agent, any activity of the CIA can be characterised as nefarious solely because it is being carried out by the CIA. Such a position ignores the fact that such organisations have many thousands of employees and carry out a wide range of mundane duties. It is perfectly possible for a member of such an organisation to be an honest and patriotic citizen whose testimony is as believable as anyone else’s. Indeed, given my previous point that for security reasons the smaller the conspiratorial team the more likely it is to be successful, it would seem likely that the great majority of members of such organisations would be innocent of any involvement in such a plot. (I would hazard a guess that the same holds true of the KGB and the mafia, both organisations with a strong interest in security.)

 

(iii) Exaggerating the power and nature of organisations. Repeatedly in such CTs we find the assumption that organisations like the CIA or the mafia are all-powerful, all-pervasive. capable of extraordinary foreknowledge and planning.[12] This assumption has difficulty in explaining the many recorded instances of inefficiency or lack of knowledge that these organisations constantly demonstrate. (There is a remarkable belief in conspiratorial circles, combining political and paranormal conspiracies, that the CIA has or had access to a circle of so-called ‘remote viewers’, people with extra-sensory powers who were able through paranormal means to provide them with information about the activities of America’s enemies that couldn’t be discovered in any other way. Such a belief has trouble in easily accommodating the fact that the CIA was woefully unprepared for the sudden break-up of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, or for the fact that America’s intelligence organisations first learned of the start of the Gulf War when Kuwaiti embassy employees looked out of the window and saw Iraqi tanks coming down the road! Sadly, it appears to be true that people calling themselves remote viewers took very substantial fees from the CIA though whether this tells us more about the gullibility of people in paranoid institutions or their carefree attitude towards spending public money I should not care to say.) The more extreme conspiracy theories may argue that such organisations are only pretending to be inefficient, in order to fool the public about the true level of their efficiency. Such a position is, as Popper would no doubt have pointed out, not open to refutation.

 

(iv) Demonising individuals. As with organisations, so with people. Once plausible candidates for roles in an assassination conspiracy are identified, they are granted remarkable powers and properties, their wickedness clearly magnified. In Kennedy CTs there is no better example of this than Meyer Lansky, the mafia’s ‘financial wizard’. Lansky was a close associate of America’s premier gangster of the 1940s, Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Not actually a gangster himself (and, technically, not actually a member of the mafia either, since Lansky—as a Jew—could not join an exclusively Sicilian brotherhood) Lansky acted as a financial adviser. He organised gambling activities for Luciano and probably played a significant role in the mafia involvement in the development of Las Vegas, and in subsequent investments of the Luciano family’s money, including those in pre-revolutionary Cuba, after Luciano’s deportation to Sicily.

 

So much is agreed. But Lansky in CT writing looms ever larger, as a man of remarkable power and influence, ever ready to use it for malign purposes, a vast and evil spider at the centre of an enormous international web, maintaining his influence with the aid of the huge sums of money which organised crime was reaping from its empire.[13] Thus there is no nefarious deed concerning the assassination or its cover-up with which Lansky cannot be linked. This picture wasn’t dented in the least by Robert Lacey’s detailed biography of Lansky published in 1991. Lacey, drawing upon a considerable body of publicly available evidence—not least the substantial body generated by Lansky’s lawsuit to enable him, as a Jew, to emigrate to Israel, was able to show that Lansky, far from being the mob’s eminence grise, was little more than a superannuated book-keeper. The arch manipulator, supposedly empowered by the mafia’s millions, led a seedy retirement in poverty and was on record as being unable to afford healthcare for his relatives. The effect of reading Lacey’s substantially documented biography is rather like that scene in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ when the curtain is drawn back and the all-powerful wizard is revealed to be a very ordinary little man.

 

The 1990s saw the publication of a remarkable amount of material about the workings of American organised crime, much of it gleaned from FBI and police surveillance during the successful campaign to imprison most of its leaders. This material reveals that mafia bosses tend to be characterised by a very limited vocabulary, a remarkable propensity for brutality and a considerable professional cunning often mixed with truly breath-taking stupidity. That they could organise a large-scale assassination conspiracy, and keep quiet about it for more than thirty-five years, seemed even less likely. As I point out below, they would almost certainly not have wanted to.

 

            (E) The canonisation of persons or (more rarely) organisations. In the Kennedy case, this has taken the form of idealising the President himself. In order to make a conspiratorial hypothesis look more plausible under (F) below, it is necessary to make the victim look as much as possible like a significant threat to the interests of the putative conspirators. In this case, Kennedy is depicted as a liberal politician, one who was a threat to established economic interests, one who took a lead in the contemporary campaign to end institutionalised discrimination against black people, and, perhaps most importantly, one who was or became something of a foreign policy dove, supporting less confrontational policies in the Cold War to the extent of being prepared to terminate US involvement in South Vietnam.

 

This canonisation initially derives from the period immediately after the assassination, a period marked by the emergence of a number of works about the Kennedy administration from White House insiders like Theodore Sorensen, Pierre Salinger and the Camelot house historian, Arthur Schlesinger, works which tended to confirm the idealisation of the recently dead president, particularly when implicitly compared with the difficulties faced by the increasingly unpopular Lyndon Johnson.

 

From the mid 1970s Kennedy’s personal character came under considerable criticism, partly resulting from the publication of biographies covering his marriage and sexual life, and the personal lives of the Kennedy family.  More importantly, for our purposes, were the stream of revelations which emerged from the congressional investigations of this time which indicated the depth of feeling in the Kennedy White House about Cuba; most important here were the Church Committee’s revelations that the CIA had conspired with members of organised crime to bring about the assassination of Fidel Castro. These, coming hard on the heels of the revelations of various criminal conspiracies within the Nixon White House, stoked up the production of CTs. (And provided a new motivation for the Kennedy assassination: that Castro or his sympathisers had found out about these attempts and had Kennedy killed in revenge.) But they also indicated that the Kennedy brothers were much harder cold war warriors than had perhaps previously been thought.

 

The changing climate of the 1980s brought a new range of biographies and memoirs—Reeves, Parmet, Wofford, etc.—which situated Kennedy more firmly in the political mainstream. It became that he was not by any means an economic or social liberal—on the question of racial segregation he had to be pushed a lot since he tended to regard the activities of Martin Luther King and others as obstructing his more important social policies. And Kennedy adopted a much more orthodox stance on the cold war than many had allowed: this was, after all, the candidate who got himself elected in 1960 by managing in the famous ‘missile gap’ affair to appear tougher on communism than Richard Nixon, no mean feat. Famously, Kennedy adopted a more moderate policy during the Cuban missile crisis than some of those recommended by his military advisers, but this can be explained more in terms of Kennedy having a better grasp of the pragmatics of the situation than in terms of his being a foreign policy liberal of some sort.

 

This changing characterisation of Kennedy, this firm re-situating of his administration within the central mainstream of American politics—a mainstream which appears considerably to the right in European terms—has been broadly rejected by proponents of Kennedy assassination CTs (some of whom also reject the critical characterisation of his personal life). The reason for this is that it plainly undercuts any motivation for some part of the American political establishment to have Kennedy removed. It is unlikely that any of Kennedy’s reforming policies, economic or social, could seriously have been considered such a threat to establishment interests. It is even more unlikely when one considers that much of Kennedy’s legislative programme was seriously bogged down in Congress and was unlikely to be passed in anything but a heavily watered-down form during his term. Much of this legislation was forced through after the assassination by Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson being a much more astute and experienced parliamentarian. The price for this social reform, though, was Johnson’s continued adherence to the verities of cold war foreign policy over Vietnam. I leave consideration of Kennedy’s Vietnam policy to the next section.

 

            (F) An inability to make rational or proportional means-end judgements. The major problem here for any Kennedy assassination CT is to come up with a motive. Such a motive must not only be of major importance to putative conspirators, it must also rationally justify a risky, expensive—and often astonishingly complicated—illegal conspiracy. Which is to say that such conspirators must see the assassination as the only or best way of bringing about their aim. The alleged motives can be broadly divided into two categories.

 

Firstly, revenge. Kennedy was assassinated in revenge for the humiliation he inflicted upon Premier Khrushchev over the Cuban missile crisis, or for plotting the assassination of Fidel Castro, or for double-crossing organised crime over alleged agreements made during his election campaign. The problem with each of these explanations is that the penalties likely to be suffered if one is detected far outweigh any rational benefits. Had Castro’s hand been detected behind the assassination—something which Johnson apparently thought all too likely—this would inevitably have swung American public opinion behind a US military invasion of Cuba and overthrow of Castro’s rule. If Khrushchev has been identified as the ultimate source of the assassination, the international crisis would have been even worse, and could well have edged the world considerably closer towards nuclear war than happened in the Cuban missile crisis. One can only make sense of such explanations on the basis of an assumption that the key conspirators are seriously irrational in this respect, and this is an assumption that we should not make without some clear evidence to support it.

 

The second category of explanations for the assassination are instrumental: Kennedy was assassinated in order to further some specific policy or to prevent him from furthering some policy which the conspirators found anathema. Here candidates include: to protect Texas oil-barons’ economic interests, to frustrate the Kennedy administration’s judicial assault upon organised crime, to bring about a more anti-Castro presidency, and—the one that plays the strongest role in contemporary Kennedy CTs such as Oliver Stone’s—to prevent an American withdrawal from Vietnam.

 

A proper response to the suggestion of any of these as a rational motive for the assassination should be to embark upon a brief cost-benefit analysis. We have to factor in not only the actual costs of organising such a conspiracy (and, in the case of the more extreme Kennedy CTs, of maintaining it for several decades afterwards to engage in what has been by any standards a pretty inefficient cover-up) but also the potential costs to be faced if the conspiracy is discovered, the assassination fails, etc.. Criminals by and large tend to be rather poor at estimating their chances of being caught; murder and armed robbery have very high clear-up rates compared to, say, burglary of unoccupied premises. The continued existence of professional armed robbers would seem to indicate that they underestimate their chances of being caught or don’t fully appreciate the comparative benefits of other lines of criminal activity.

 

But though assassination conspirators are by definition criminals, we are to assume here that they are figures in the establishment, professional men in the intelligence, military and political communities, and so likely to be more rational in their outlook than ordinary street criminals. (Though this is a defeasible assumption, since the post-war history of western intelligence agencies has indicated a degree of internal paranoia sometimes bordering on the insane. A substantial part of British intelligence, for instance, spent almost two decades trying to prove that the then head of MI5 was a Soviet agent, a claim that appears to have no credibility at all.) If we assume that the Mafia played such a role in an assassination conspiracy, it is still plausible to believe that they would consider the risks of failure. In fact, we have some evidence to support this belief since, though organised crime is by and large a very brutal institution, in the US—as opposed to the very different conditions prevailing in Italy—it maintains a policy of not attacking dangerous judges or politicians. When in the 1940s senior Mafia boss Albert Anastasia proposed murdering Thomas Dewey, then a highly effective anti-crime prosecutor in New York and subsequently a republican presidential candidate in 1948, the response was to have Anastasia murdered rather than risk the troubles that Dewey’s assassination would have brought down upon the heads of organised crime. An even more effective prosecutor, Rudolph Giuliani, remained unscathed throughout his career.

 

Against the risks of being caught, we have to balance the costs of trying to achieve one’s goal by some other less dramatic and probably more legal path. The plain fact is that there are a large number of legal and effective ways of changing a president’s mind or moderating his behaviour. One can organise public campaigns, plant stories in the press, stimulate critical debate in congress, assess or manipulate public opinion through polls etc. When the health care industry in the US wanted to defeat the Clinton administrations reform proposals, for instance, they didn’t opt for assassination but went instead for a highly successful campaign to bring congress and substantial parts of public opinion against the proposals, which soon became dead in the water.

 

On the specific case of American withdrawal from Vietnam, all of the above applies. In the first case, following on from (E) above, it can be plausibly argued that Kennedy had no such intention. He certainly on occasion floated the idea, sounding out people around him, but this is something that politicians do all the time as part of the process of weighing policy options and shouldn’t be taken as evidence for such an option. But to see Kennedy as seriously considering such an option is to see him as a figure considerably out of the Democratic mainstream. He would certainly have been aware of the effects that an Asian policy can have upon domestic matters; as a young congressman he would have been intimately aware of the effect that the fall of China to communism in 1949 had upon the last Democratic administration, severely weakening Harry Truman’s effectiveness. For years afterwards the Democrats were regarded as the people who “lost China” despite the fact that there was nothing they could have done—short of an all-out war, like that occurring in Korea shortly afterwards, which couldn’t possibly be won without the use of nuclear weapons and all that entails. Kennedy’s administration had a much stronger presence in South Vietnam and it can reasonably be asked whether he would have wanted to run the risk of becoming the president who “lost Vietnam”. He would also have been aware of the problem that ultimately faced Lyndon Johnson, that one could only maintain a forceful policy of domestic reform by mollifying congress over matters of foreign policy. The price for Johnson’s Great Society reforms was a continued adherence to a policy of involvement in Vietnam, long after Johnson himself—fully aware of this bind—doubted the wisdom of this policy. Kennedy’s domestic reforms were already in legislative difficulties; to believe that he was prepared to withdraw from Vietnam, then, is to believe that he was effectively abandoning his domestic programmes. (That Kennedy was alleged to be considering such an action in his second term, if re-elected, doesn’t affect this point. He would still have been a lame-duck president, and would also have weakened the chances of any possible Democratic successor, something that would certainly have been of interest to other members of his party.)

 

It thus appears unlikely that Kennedy would have seriously considered withdrawing completely from Vietnam. But if he had, a number of options were available to opponents of such a policy. Firstly, as noted above, they could have encouraged opposition to such a policy in congress and other important institutions, and among the American public. There was certainly a strongly sympathetic Republican and conservative Democrat presence in congress to form the foundations of such an opposition, as well as among newspaper publishers and other media outlets. If Kennedy had underestimated the domestic problems that withdrawal would cause him, such a campaign would concentrate his mind upon them.

 

And secondly, opponents could work to change Kennedy’s mind. They could do this by controlling the information available for Kennedy and his advisers. In particular, military sources could manipulate the information flowing from Vietnam itself. (That Kennedy thought something like this was happening may be indicated by his insistence on sending civilian advisers to Vietnam to report back to him personally.) This policy worked well in Johnson’s time—the control of information over the trivial events in the Bay of Tonkin in 1965 was manipulated to indicate a serious crisis which thus forced Johnson into inserting a heavy military presence into South Vietnam in response. There is no reason to believe that such a policy would not have worked if Kennedy had still been in office. At the very least, it would be rational to adopt such a policy first, to try cheap, legal and probably efficient methods of bringing about one’s goal before even contemplating such a dramatic, illegal and high-risk activity as assassination. (I omit here any consideration of the point that members of the American establishment might feel a moral revulsion at the idea of taking such action against their own president. Such a claim may well be true, but the argument from rationality does not require it.)

 

At bottom what we face here is what we might term Goodenough’s Paradox of Conspiracies: the larger or more powerful an alleged conspiracy, the less need they have for conspiring. A sufficiently large collection of members of the American political, intelligence and military establishment—the kind of conspiracy being alleged by Oliver Stone et al.—wouldn’t need to engage in such nefarious activity since they would have the kind of organisation, influence, access to information, etc. that could enable them to achieve their goal efficiently and legally. The inability noted in (F) to make adequate means-end decisions means that UCT proponents fail to grasp the force of this paradox.

 

            (G) Evidence against a UCT is always evidence for. The tendency of modern CTs has been to move from conspiracies which try to keep their nefarious activities secret to more pro-active conspiracies which go to a good deal of trouble to manufacture evidence either that there was a different conspiracy or that there was no conspiracy at all. This is especially true of Kennedy assassination CTs.

 

The epistemological attitude of Kennedy CTs has changed notably over the years. In the period 1964-76 the central claim of such theories was that the evidence collected by the Warren Commission and made public, when fairly assessed, did not support the official lone assassin hypothesis but indicated the presence of two or more assassins and therefore a conspiracy. Public pressure in the aftermath of Watergate brought about a congressional investigation of the case. In its 1980 report the House Select Committee eventually decided, almost solely on the basis of subsequently discredited acoustic evidence, that there had indeed been a conspiracy. But more importantly, the committee’s independent panels of experts re-examined the key evidence, photographic, forensic and ballistic, and decided that it supported the Warren Commission’s conclusion.

 

This led to a sea-change in CTs from 1980 onwards. Given the preponderance of independently verified ‘best evidence’ supporting the lone assassin hypothesis, CT proponents began to argue that some or all of this evidence had been faked. This inevitably entailed a much larger conspiracy than had previously been hypothesised, one that not only assassinated the president but also was able to gain access to the evidence of the case afterwards in order to change it, suppress it or manufacture false evidence. They thus fell foul of (F) above. Since the reason for such CTs was often to produce a hypothesis supported by much weaker evidence, eye-witness testimony and so on, they would tend to fall foul of (A), (B) and (C) as well.

 

One problem with such CTs was that they tended to disagree with one another over which evidence had been faked. Thus many theorists argued that the photographic and X-ray record of the presidential post mortem had been tampered with to conceal evidence of conspiracy, while Lifton (1980) as we saw argued that the record was genuine but the body itself had been tampered with. Other theorists, e.g. Fetzer & co., argue that the X-rays indicate a conspiracy while the photographs do not, implying that the photographs have been tampered with. This latter, widespread belief introduces a new contradiction into the case, since it posits a conspiracy of tremendous power and organisation, able to gain access to the most important evidence of the case, yet one which is careless or stupid enough not to make sure that the evidence it leaves behind is fully consistent. (And, of course, it goes against the verdict of the House Committee’s independent panel of distinguished forensic scientists and radiographers that the record of the autopsy was genuine, and consistent, both internally and with the hypothesis that Oswald alone was the assassin.)

 

Of particular interest here is the Zapruder movie film of the assassination. Stills from this film were originally published, in the Warren Report and in the press, to support the official lone assassin hypothesis. When a bootleg copy of this film surfaced in the mid 1970s it was taken as significant evidence against the official version and most CTs since then have relied upon one interpretation or another of this film for support. But now that it is clear, especially since better copies of the film are now available, that the wounds Kennedy suffers in the film do not match those hypothesised by those CT proponents arguing for the falsity of the autopsy evidence, some of these proponents now claim to detect signs that the Zapruder film itself has been faked, and there has been much discussion about the chain of possession of this film in the days immediately after the assassination to see if there is any possibility of its being in the hands of someone who could have tampered with it.

 

What is happening here is that epistemologically these CTs are devouring their own tails. If the evidence that was originally regarded as foundational for proving the existence of a conspiracy is now itself impeached, then this ought to undermine the original conspiracy case. If no single piece of evidence in the case can be relied upon then we have no reason for believing anything at all, and the abyss of total scepticism yawns.

 

Interestingly there seems to be a complete lack of what I termed above ‘meta-evidence’, that is, actual evidence that any of this evidence has been faked. Reasons for believing in this forgery hypothesis tend to fall into one of three groups. (i) It is claimed that some sign of forgery can be detected in the evidence itself. Since much of this evidence consists of poor quality film and photographs taken at the assassination scene, these have turned into blurred Rorschach tests where just about anything can be seen if one squints long and hard enough. In the case of the autopsy X-rays, claims of apparent fakery tend to be made by people untrained in radiography and the specialised medical skill of reading such X-rays. (ii) Forgery is hypothesised to explain some alleged discrepancy between two pieces of evidence. Thus when differences are alleged to exist between the autopsy photographs and the X-rays it is alleged that one or other (or both) have been tampered with. (iii) Forgery is hypothesised in order to explain away evidence that is clearly inconsistent with the proposed conspiracy hypothesis.

 

An interesting case of the latter involves the so-called ‘backyard photos’, photographs supposedly depicting Oswald standing in the yard of his house and posing with his rifle, pistol and various pieces of left-wing literature. For Oswald himself was confronted with these by police officers after his arrest and claimed then that they had been faked—he had had some employment experience in the photographic trade and claimed to know how easily such pictures could be faked. And ever since then CT proponents have made the same claims.

 

But one problem with such claims is that evidence seldom exists in a vacuum, but is interconnected with other evidence. Thus we have the sworn testimony of Oswald’s wife that she took the photographs, the evidence of independent photographic experts that the pictures were taken with Oswald’s camera, documentary evidence in his own handwriting that Oswald ordered the rifle in the photos and was the sole hirer of the PO box to which it was delivered, eyewitness evidence that Oswald possessed such a rifle and that one of these photos had been seen prior to the assassination, and so on. To achieve any kind of consistency with the forgery hypothesis all of this evidence must itself be faked or perjured. Thus the forgery hypothesis inevitably ends up impeaching the credibility of such a range of evidence that a conspiracy of enormous proportions and efficiency is entailed, a conspiracy which runs into the problems raised in (F) above. These problems are so severe that the forgery hypothesis must be untenable without the existence of some credible meta-evidence, some proof that acts of forgery took place. Without such meta-evidence, all we have is an unjustifiable attempt to convert evidence against a conspiracy into evidence for merely on the grounds that the evidence doesn’t fit the proposed CT, which is an example of (A) too.

 

            (H) The fallacy of the spider’s web. This form of reasoning has been central to many of the conspiratorial works about the JFK assassination: indeed, Duffy (1988) is entitled The Web! Scott (1977) was perhaps the first full-length work in this tradition. It concentrates on drawing links between Oswald and the people he came into contact with, and the murky worlds of US intelligence, anti-Castro Cuban groups and organised crime, eventually linking in this fashion the world of Dealey Plaza with that of the Watergate building and the various secret activities of the Nixon administration. Such a project is indeed an interesting one, one which enlightens us considerably about the world of what Scott terms ‘parapolitics’. It is made especially easy by the fact that Oswald in his short life had at least tangential connections with a whole range of suspicious organisations, including the CIA, the KGB, pro- and anti-Castro Cuban groups, the US Communist Party and other leftist organisations, organised crime figures in New Orleans and Texas, and so on. And considerable webs can be drawn outwards, from Oswald’s contacts to their contacts, and so on.

 

As I say, such research is intrinsically interesting, but the fallacy occurs when it is used in support of a conspiracy theory. For all that it generates is suspicion, not evidence. That Oswald knew X or Y is evidence only that he might have had an opportunity to conspire with them, and doesn’t support the proposition that he did. The claim is even weaker for people that Oswald only knew at second or third or fourth hand. And some of these connections are much less impressive than authors claim: that Oswald knew people who ultimately knew Meyer Lansky becomes much less interesting when, as I noted in (D) above, Lansky is seen as much more minor figure than the almost omnipotent organised crime kingpin he is often depicted as.

 

Ultimately this fallacy depends upon a kind of confusion between quantity and quality, one that seems to believe that a sufficient quantity of suspicion inevitably metamorphoses into something like evidence. There is, as the old saying has it, no smoke without fire, and surely such an inordinate quantity of smoke could only have been produced by a fire of some magnitude. But thirty years of research haven’t found much in the way of fire, only more smoke. Some of the more outrageous CTs here have been discredited—inasmuch as such CTs can ever be discredited—and the opening of KGB archives in recent years and access to living KGB personnel has shown that Oswald’s contacts with that organisation were almost certainly innocent. Not only is there no evidence that Oswald ever worked for the KGB, but those KGB officers who monitored Oswald closely during his two year stay in the USSR were almost unanimously of the opinion that he was too unbalanced to be an employee of any intelligence organisation.

 

But a problem with suspicion is that it cannot be easily dispelled. Since web-reasoning never makes clear exactly what the nature of Oswald’s relationship with his various contacts was, it is that much harder to establish the claim that they were innocent. Ultimately, this can only be done negatively, by demonstrating the sheer unlikeliness of Oswald being able to conspire with anyone. The ample evidence of the sheer contingency of Oswald’s presence in the book depository on the day of the assassination argues strongly against his being part of a conspiracy to kill the president. Whether in fact he was a part of some other conspiracy, as some authors have argued, is an interesting question but one not directly relevant to assassination CTs.

 

            (I) The classic logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. This applies to all those assassination CTs which seek to establish some motive for Kennedy’s death from some alleged events occurring afterwards. The most dramatic of these, as featured in Oliver Stone’s film, is the argument from America’s disastrous military campaign in Vietnam. US military involvement escalated after Kennedy’s death, therefore it happened because of Kennedy’s death, therefore Kennedy’s death was brought about in order to cause an increased American presence in Vietnam. The frailty of this reasoning is obvious. As I pointed out in (F) above, such a view attributes to the proposed conspirators a significant inability to match ends and means rationally. In addition there is no end to the possible effects that can be proposed here. Ultimately everything that is regarded as immoral about modern America can be traced back to the assassination. As I pointed out in a recent lecture, what motivates this view is:

a desire for a justification of a view of America as essentially a benign and divinely inspired force in the world, a desire held in the face of American sin in Vietnam and elsewhere. There are plausible explanations for Vietnam and Watergate in terms of the domination of post-war foreign policy by cold-war simplicities, and the growth of executive power at the expense of legislative controls, and so on. They are, for those not interested in political science, dull explanations. Above all, they do not provide the emotional justification of conspiratorial explanations. To view Vietnam as the natural outcome of foreign policy objectives of the cold-war establishment, of a set of attitudes shared by both Republican and Democrat, above all to view it as the express wish of the American people—opinion polls registered majority support for the war until after the Tet disaster in 1968—is ultimately to view Vietnam as the legitimate and rational outcome of the American system at work. A quasi-religious view of America as ‘the city on the hill’, the place where God will work out his purpose for men, cannot afford to entertain these flaws. Hence the appeal of an evil conspiracy on which these sins can be heaped.[14]

Underlying this reasoning, then, is an emotional attachment to a view of America as fundamentally decent combined with a remarkable ignorance about the real nature of politics. All of the features of America’s history after 1963 that can be used as a possible motive for the assassination can be equally or better explained in terms of the ordinary workings of US politics. Indeed many of them, including the commitment to Vietnam and the aggressively murderous attitude towards Castro’s Cuba, can be traced to Kennedy’s White House and earlier. Though CT theorists often proclaim their commitment to realism and a hard-headed attitude towards matters, it seems clear that their reliance upon this kind of reasoning is motivated more by emotion than by facts.

 

5. Conclusions

 

The accusation is often made that conspiracy theorists, particularly of the more extreme sort, are crazy, or immature, or ignorant. This response to UCTs may be at least partly true but does not make clear how CT thinking is going astray. What I have tried to show is how various weaknesses in arguing, assessing evidence, etc. interact to produce not just CTs but unwarranted CTs. A conspiratorial explanation can be the most reasonable explanation of a set of facts, but where we can identify the kinds of critical thinking problems I have outlined here, a CT becomes increasingly unwarranted.

 

Apart from these matters logical and epistemological, it seems to me that there is also an interesting psychological component to the generation of UCTs. Human beings possess an innate pattern-seeking mechanism, imposing order and explanation upon the data presented to us. But this mechanism can be too sensitive and we start to see patterns where there are none, leading to a refusal to recognise the sheer amount of contingency and randomness in the world. Perhaps, as Keeley says, “the problem is a psychological one of not recognizing when to stop searching for hidden causes”.[15] Seeing meaning where there is none leads to seeing evidence where there is none: a combination of evidential faults reinforces the view that our original story, our originally perceived pattern, is correct—a pernicious feedback loop which reinforces the belief of the UCT proponent in their own theory. And here criticism  cannot help, for the criticism—and indeed the critic—become part of the pattern, part of the problem, part, indeed, of the conspiracy.[16]

 

Conspiracy theories are valuable, like any other type of theory, for there are indeed conspiracies. We want to find a way to preserve all that is useful in the CT as a way of explaining the world while avoiding the UCT which at worst slides into paranoid nonsense. I agree with Keeley that there can be no exact dotted line along which Occam’s Razor can be drawn here. Instead, we require a greater knowledge of the thinking processes which underlie CTs and the way in which they can offend against good standards of critical thinking. There is no way to defeat UCTs; the more entrenched they are, the more resistance to disproof they become. Like some malign virus of thinking, they possess the ability to turn their enemies’ powers against them, making any supposedly neutral criticism of the CT itself part of the conspiracy. It is this sheer irrefutability that no doubted irritated Popper so much.

 

If we cannot defeat UCTs through refutation then perhaps the best we can do is inoculate against them by a better development of critical thinking skills. These ought not to be developed in isolation—it is a worrying feature of this field that many otherwise critical thinkers become prone to conspiracy theorising when they move outside of their own speciality—but developed as an essential prerequisite for doing well in any field of intellectual endeavour. Keeley concludes that

there is nothing straightforwardly analytic that allows us to distinguish between good and bad conspiracy theories... The best we can do is track the evaluation of given theories over time and come to some consensus as to when belief in the theory entails more scepticism than we can stomach.[17]

Discovering whether or to what extent a particular CT adheres to reasonable standards of critical thinking practice gives us a better measure of its likely acceptability than mere gastric response, while offering the possibility of being able to educate at least some people against their appeal, as potential consumers or creators of unwarranted conspiracy theories.

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blakey, G. Robert & Billings, Richard (1981) Fatal Hour -The Plot to Kill the President, N.Y.:   Berkeley Publishing

Cutler, Robert (1975) The Umbrella Man, Manchester, Mass.: Cutler Designs

Donovan, Robert J.   (1964)  The Assassins, N.Y.: Harper Books

Duffy, James. R. (1988) The Web, Gloucester: Ian Walton Publishing

Eddowes, Michael (1977) The Oswald File, N.Y.: Ace Books

Fetzer, James (ed.) (1997) Assassination Science, Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing

Fisher, Alec & Scriven, Michael (1997)  Critical Thinking - Its Definition and Assessment, Norwich: Centre for Critical Thinking, U.E.A.

Hofstadter, Richard P.  (1964) The Paranoid Style in American Politics, London: Jonathan Cape

Hume, David (1748) Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by P.H. Nidditch 1975, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keeley, Brian L.  (1999) ‘Of Conspiracy Theories’, Journal of Philosophy 96, 109-26.

Lacey, Robert  (19901)  Little Man, London: Little Brown

Lifton, David (1980)  Best Evidence, London: Macmillan. 2nd ed. 1988 N.Y.: Carroll & Graf

Norris, S.P.  & King, R.  (1983) Test on Appraising Observations, St Johns Newfoundland: Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Norris, S.P. & King, R. (1984) ‘Observational ability: Determining and extending its presence’, Informal Logic 6, 3-9.

Oglesby, Carl  (1976)  The Yankee-Cowboy War , 2nd ed. 1977, N.Y.: Berkley Publishing

Pigden, Charles (1993) ‘Popper revisited, or What Is Wrong With Conspiracy Theories?’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 25, 3-34.

Popkin, Richard H.  (1966)  The Second Oswald , London: Sphere Books

Popper, Karl  (1945)  The Open Society and its Enemies, 5th ed. 1966, London, Routledge.

Posner, Gerald  (1993)  Case Closed, N.Y.: Random House

Scheim, David E.  (1983)  Contract On America, Silver Spring, Maryland: Argyle Press

Scott, Peter Dale  (1977)  Crime and Cover-Up, Berkeley, Cal: Westworks

Stone, Jim  (1991)  Conspiracy of One , Fort Worth TX: Summit Group

Stone, Oliver & Sklar, Zachary  (1992)  JFK - The Movie, New York: Applause Books.

Thompson, Josiah   (1967) Six Seconds in Dallas , 2nd ed. 1976, N.Y.: Berkeley Publishing

Wilson, Robert Anton (1989) ‘Beyond True and False’, in Schultz, T. (ed.) The Fringes of Reason, New York: Harmony.