I'm not sure what you mean by "jive".
I mean "to be in general accordance with." Specifically I mean an accordance between standards of reference and production. The sources HSienzant alluded to are also similarly documented and easily available. Why can he (and the rest of us) simply refer to them as easily as you refer to external materials? Why are only your critics obliged to a laborious production requirement?
As for your theory, of course I am familiar with it. What I am not familiar with is the evidence which supports the notion that Oswald acted alone.
We covered that the first day.
You phrase the proposition as, "the notion that Oswald acted alone," and you demand specific evidence to affirm that proposition. The notion itself is, by nature, a
negative proposition. I can phrase it equivalently as "no other person but Oswald fired at Kennedy that day," which renders it in more acceptable philosophical form. Now keep in mind that my contraposition of "fired at Kennedy" and "acted alone" are not strictly diametrical. I do this because I take you to mean "the notion that Oswald acted alone [in shooting at Kennedy]." We have alluded to other ways in which Oswald might have had outside assistance, but I presume you're not trying to invoke those on the present point.
When we understand the normalized proposition to be "no other person but Oswald fired at Kennedy that day," we recognize it as a negative proposition and we impose the burden of proof accordingly. As you may be aware, imposing the burden of proof upon a negative proposition does not result in a testable system. Accordingly the burden of proof must then go to the converse -- to anyone who asserts that some other person (named or otherwise) acted along with Oswald as a shooter. That's how the testability issue is resolved. Only affirmative propositions can do anything with a burden of proof; a negative proposition can at best only point at the continued absence of evidence for any alternative.
You have assiduously interpreted this naturally-arising condition somehow as an admission on the part of your critics that there is no evidence in favor of their belief, that they have abrogated a burden of proof, or that they cannot prove their case. A vast amount of writing has occurred in the legal, mathematical, and philosophical arenas regarding presumptive reasoning, null hypothesization, and testability. Your interpretation stands starkly in contrast to that body of work. Practically any introductory textbook on philosophy will provide you a suitable foundation, so I urge you to select one that appeals to you and study it.
Let's return to the notion of justification for a negative proposition. Such support, as it exists, is to be found (as I wrote above) in "the continued absence of evidence for any alternative." And that is exactly how it was phrased on your first day. Why do people believe that Oswald was the only shooter? Because of the ongoing lack of credible and sufficient evidence for any alternative, named or unnamed. Your insistence that "support" or justification for the null hypothesis, the negative proposition, should exist as an explicit body of affirmation is philosophically absurd. What body of evidence that I can point to proves that there is no invisible elf living in my backyard?
Such argumentation would often be subject to caveats arising under arguments from silence, viz.,"If your position is based upon the absence of evidence, then it is not evidence of absence." If the landscape of evidence is sparse, it can be construed as likely that new evidence may indeed challenge the null hypothesis and provide evidence of presence. But new evidence must actually be presented. Otherwise the null holds. In any case, skeptics who express the null hold it only presumptively, not as a matter of assertion. That tenet accepts the effect of
eventual shifts in the evidence while not requiring any response to premature or speculative propositions. "My position is indeed based on the absence of evidence; as such I do not
assert absence, but merely note it parsimoniously explains the evidence as it presently stands."
But in the case of Kennedy's assassination it would be hard to argue that the landscape of evidence is anything well-forested. The more study that occurs, and the less directed and coherent those alternative conclusions become, the more likely it is that the ongoing lack of credible evidence for any alternative or additional perpetrator accurately represents the true picture of the evidence both as it presently stands
and as it is likely to appear from now on. Hence the more justified the skeptics are in accepting that divergence of alternatives as a suitable justification for a belief.
You asked what people
believed. You were given expressions of belief, which you seem to have mischaracterized as concluded assertions. Belief is mutable. But it doesn't change with every wind of doctrine. Based as it is upon a long-standing consilience of proof for one particular outcome, it possesses some degree of inertia. But a finite degree, because in contrast to the consilience is the ever-present acknowledgement that it is a null hypothesis in the philosophical sense, and an argument from silence in the empirical sense.
The responsibility to overcome that inertia rests with any person who suggests a direction in which the belief should move. And it's his responsibility to provide enough evidentiary force to overcome that inertia. Questioning why there is any inertia at all, or complaining that unseating a belief is too hard, simply doesn't rise to the level of critical attention. Nor do efforts that sidestep the application of sheer evidentiary force. No rhetorical legerdemain or emotional conjuring has any effect upon that inertia. You were warned about those smoke and mirrors when you first arrived, yet proceeded to wave the wand anyway.
If you cannot muster sufficient affirmative force, belief slides back into its erstwhile detent. And this is proper. When one has examined the picture of evidence as it presently stands, and upon that evidence arrives at a belief regarding it, he does not need to repeat that exercise anew every time his belief is tickled by some vaunted alternative. If it is insubstantial, his previous exercise reasserts itself.
Inertia does not relieve the critic of
all responsibility in argumentation. In fact, the expression of that inertia is the treatment of the proponent's affirmative case by means of critical analysis. Inertia without that intellectual process is simply entrenchment. But just because some people may be entrenched doesn't show that all who exhibit inertia are. When people are giving you reasons for doubting your affirmation, and you ignore those reasons, the explanation for the inertia is not entrenchment.
Treatment of the proponent's affirmative case does not dictate an affirmative counter-case. Treatment (i.e., refutation and rebuttal) most often takes the form of evaluating the strength of the proponent's affirmation, identifying structural errors in logic and, where appropriate, deficiency in submitted evidence. Hence repeated efforts to shift the burden of proof or to demand only affirmative rebuttals denies a great deal of what the intellectual process is designed to accomplish.
On the first day we told you that the basis for our belief that no one besides Oswald shot at Kennedy was the lack of evidence for any person but Oswald, and the ongoing failure to uncover any. Now perhaps it is clearer how that works. You identified observations you felt weren't explained adequately by the Oswald-alone hypothesis and asserted that it was explained more appropriately by the affirmation that another person besides Oswald was firing at the President's motorcade. You are now on the hook to show how that explanation best answers
all the data, not just the bit you find puzzling. You have been given a list of reasons why your explanation is unconvincing. And rather than improve upon it, you've employed an endless stream of rhetorical game-playing to avoid any further meaningful test of your explanation.
This will be a great time to pile on all the personal attacks and name calling that you guys do so well.
Ad hominem, and a renewed effort to make the debate about "Robert Harris."
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