Epistemology Of Conspiracy Theories Essay

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Brinta Kundu

June 14, 2023

Dr. Matthews

Epistemology of Conspiracy Theories

On November 22, 1963, the 35th president of the United States, John Fitzgerald

Kennedy, was assassinated by gunshots. After nearly a year after the assassination, the Warren

Commission was completed and made public for anyone to read. These reports claimed that there was only one person responsible for the assassination, that person being Lee Harvey

Oswald. Though not long after, many discrepancies were found to suggest that not everything written in the Warren Commission perfectly aligned with the reality of what had truly transpired.

Consequently, this led to the rise of conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination that implies that the assassination was actually

Arguably, denying every conspiracy theory without reservation would cripple people's epistemology more. It would mean they could only ever be fed the commonly accepted narrative that the government allows. This means the government would have near free reign for them to have “coercion and manipulation pose as

‘communication’ and close off opportunities for other, more genuine, forms of understanding”

(71 Simpson). A greater form of epistemology would be for people to work on themselves to be able to avoid conforming or being coerced into any single idea, whether that be a conspiracy theory or from the government itself. Having a good epistemology is not about denying information or ideas but allowing them and having people be educated enough to think, consider and critique those ideas for themselves.

Going back to the original question, how credible are these conspiracy theories about

John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination or are they simply nonsense created for sensationalism?

Most of the time a conspiracy theory will be either dismissed or made to seem very flawed by big media outlets due to them having a relationship very close to the government.

One example of this can be found in The New York Times article on when 13,173 documents related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination were released by NARA, on December 15.

Because of their close relationship to power, The New York Times barely acknowledges any conspiracy theories besides in passing. The second time they mentioned it was by saying, “in a

1979 report that there was evidence suggesting the possibility of a conspiracy but did not identify who those conspirators might have been” (Levenson and Cameron). When they do talk about conspiracy theories, they also make it seem like it does not matter because it is from a report from more than three decades ago and they do not specify what the conspiracy actually was.

When looking at the inverse, an alternative media outlet with a very distant relationship to power like The Unz review, the difference becomes apparent. The Unz centers its entire article around the conspiracy theory that the assassination heavily involved the CIA. However, as