s?r`ch?sm
7/5/2010 12:40:00 AM
"Hope" <holleratwaller@gmail.com> wrote:
> "s?r`ch?sm" wrote:
>...
> Almost any question can be deemed to be rhetorical by someone;
> not all questions are. Sometimes it can be interesting to answer
> supposedly rhetorical questions and see where that goes. Other
> times, it's not as interesting.
>
> > "hy" wrote:
> >All of my posts were poems or something like that.
>
>That sounds like an answer I might have gotten from my students.
>"I wrote an essay...or...something like that. Do I get an 'A'...or
>something like that?" *LOL*
>
Well, an 'F' is something like an 'A' in that they're both letter grades.
>
> Even more interesting at times is when poetically-rhetorical questions
> raise other questions, rather than answers.
>
>Yep. I find that I have had some of my best "AHA!" moments from
>contemplating questions someone else thought/said were rhetorical.
>Maybe that speaks to my intellectual laziness. ;-)
>
It can't be laziness in that context because it's easier to regard
non-rhetorical questions as being rhetorical, rather than contemplating
additional questions, (which is more 'work'). ;p
>
>I also find that people sometimes try to disguise their real questions
>under rhetorical ones. There are just some questions they are hesitant
>to approach directly, so they find a way to get in through the back door.
>
That's an astute observation of human nature. Some people do indeed employ
such methods, often for what they believe are reasons of their own, (and not
the extant reasons themselves).
>
>That way they can also maintain plausible deniability, if they
>get a reaction they don't want to deal with.
>
Do you mean as in claiming they weren't asking what they were asking, after
the inquiry?
>
>A similar kind of behavior is dismissing something out of hand
>as a stereotype and refusing to discuss how it got to be a
>stereotype in the first place.
>
Some folks don't enjoy having their cherished notions challenged -
especially if those notions are based upon 'faith'. A plausible explanation
for this phenomenon would be that those folks don't enjoy being shown to be
in error and believe it is their manifest destiny to cling to an erroroneous
faith. Oddly enough, they are free to cling to whatever they want to,
whether it's in error or not. Another peculiar aspect of human nature is
one in which an insistence that 'one plus one equals seven' can be claimed
as a matter of 'faith', rather than reason, (even when such a belief is
demonstrably false).
>