As far as I can tell, this isn’t the complaint. The complaint is that the psychologizing just isn’t sufficiently substantiated in the text. Good prose and compelling narrative structure don’t require that. (You might occupy an epistemic state where you’re confident that your interpretation is correct, but that’s a separate question from how much readers should update based on the evidence presented.)
I found the post overall quite good but noticed some of the same things that mike_hawke pointed out.
ETA: I do sort of expect this response to feel like I’m missing the point, or something, but I think your response was misunderstanding the original complaint. The discomfort was not with using “effective rhetoric to present the truth”, but with using rhetoric to present something that readers had no justified reason to believe was the truth.
As far as I can tell, this isn’t the complaint. The complaint is that the psychologizing just isn’t sufficiently substantiated in the text. Good prose and compelling narrative structure don’t require that. (You might occupy an epistemic state where you’re confident that your interpretation is correct, but that’s a separate question from how much readers should update based on the evidence presented.)
I found the post overall quite good but noticed some of the same things that mike_hawke pointed out.
ETA: I do sort of expect this response to feel like I’m missing the point, or something, but I think your response was misunderstanding the original complaint. The discomfort was not with using “effective rhetoric to present the truth”, but with using rhetoric to present something that readers had no justified reason to believe was the truth.