The Emperor's New Clothes story has always bothered me. After the little boy says, but he doesn't have any clothes on, why doesn't everyone else just laugh and say, oh, look, the little boy is not sophisticated and clever enough to see the fine new clothes of the emperor, as I can? Wasn't that the con, that only the best quality people could see the clothes? So why should one person's announcement make it common knowledge that there were no clothes? The story doesn't quite work for me.

Since everyone was pretending they could see the clothes, no-one considered the possibility that they might not exist. The child, who didn't know about the invisible cloth, simply assumed that the emperor was naked; when everyone considered this possibility, they realized they had all simply pretended they could see the clothes.

Of course, since children are often assumed to lack wisdom, the child's inability to see the clothes isn't reason to think they don't exist. (Why was the Emperor deliberately exposing himself to idiots? This always bothered me as a kid.)