Is your point here that you didn’t literally switch to arguing in favor of the proposition Y, but rather switched to asking what led to Y being the case? This is a nitpick—a distinction without a difference
Here you seem to be saying that someone might not be literally arguing for something, but he might in effect be doing so anyway.
Yet your original post seems to reject that concept. Here you claim that Zack is wrong because he did not take someone’s words literally, and instead did interpret those words to be in effect saying something:
“But if I take your specific word choice and imagine a whole epistemological stance that produced that word choice, I disagree with that epistemological stance because of such-and-such.”
Here you seem to be saying that someone might not be literally arguing for something, but he might in effect be doing so anyway.
Yet your original post seems to reject that concept. Here you claim that Zack is wrong because he did not take someone’s words literally, and instead did interpret those words to be in effect saying something:
I’d probably need more proof-of-work of understanding to want to continue engaging