Rhetorical Question Accidentally Answered, Destabilizing Entire Lecture

A carefully deployed rhetorical question was catastrophically answered during a Tuesday morning Philosophy of Language lecture at Pemberton University, derailing the class and forcing professor Dr. Claudia Trope to abandon her lesson plan entirely. The incident occurred when Dr. Trope, building toward a discussion of epistemic uncertainty, posed what she intended as a purely rhetorical question: 'But can we ever truly know anything?' Freshman Bradley Literal raised his hand and delivered a fifteen-minute extemporaneous response citing neuroscience, Bayesian probability, and what he called 'a really interesting podcast I heard about proprioception.' 'He just... answered it,' said Dr. Trope, still visibly shaken hours later. 'I've been deploying rhetorical questions for twenty-three years. No one has ever answered one. The whole point is that they're not supposed to be answered. It's in the name.' Bradley's response, which included a handout he had apparently prepared 'just in case someone asked,' sent the lecture into a tailspin. Students who understood the question was rhetorical sat in horrified silence. Students who did not began raising their hands to offer their own answers. 'Within five minutes, the class had become an open forum on epistemology,' said teaching assistant Morgan Pragma. 'Dr. Trope's entire argument about the limits of knowledge was undermined by a room full of people enthusiastically claiming to know things.' Dr. Trope has announced that all future rhetorical questions will be prefaced with the disclaimer 'The following question is rhetorical. Do not answer it. I cannot stress this enough.' Bradley has asked whether the disclaimer itself is rhetorical.