For quite a few years now Austhink Consulting has run a 3-day advanced argument mapping workshop using the JFK assassination as a case study. Specifically, we used the trial arguments by Jim Garrison, as presented in the Oliver Stone movie JFK, that there must have been a conspiracy.
We remained officially agnostic about the conclusion (i.e. whether there was or was not a conspiracy) though we leaned towards the position that the core arguments for conspiracy, while fascinating and good grist for an argument mapping workshop, are problematic. However it does take a very close analysis, of the kind made possible by rigorous argument mapping, to see clearly where and why they fail.
My Austhink colleague Paul Monk, who is a bit of a JFK buff and conspiracy sceptic, recently prepared a high-level hypothesis map providing the big picture – the major hypotheses (conspiracy, lone assassin, lone assassin plus accident), variants of those hypotheses, and an indication of the main arguments (a) for conspiracy, and (b) for Lee Harvey Oswald as the main assassin.
An image of the map showing first three levels only:
Download a pdf file of the whole map.
As with any complex map, the best way to view it is from within bCisive, where you can use zoom and hide/show and layout facilities to improve “viewability”.
Tim van Gelder 