Dreyfus, "Refocusing the question": By parody of reasoning, one could argue that, since beginning bicycle riders can only stay upright by using training wheels, when they finally manage to ride without training wheels, we should conclude they must then be using invisible ones, and the burden of proof is on anyone who thinks otherwise.
Encountering this sentence is almost unbearable for me. People do make mistakes, and this might be one. But even if it is a mistake, it's a happy one (like many occurrences of "inciteful"), and Dreyfus could just be being clever—this is a parody of the reasoning in question. But you can't tell. It's completely dry and nothing else in the paper smells of jokiness. The charitable thing would just be to assume that it's intentional, of course. But I can't let it lie.
It certainly makes me want to use the phrase "by parody of reasoning" more often! Perhaps it's Freudian in Dreyfus' case?
Posted by: germanidealist | January 27, 2010 at 10:02 AM