expressions - How do we describe answering a question tangentially to how it was put forward?


This might take some background. Role-Playing Games Stack Exchange, like any other site, sometimes receives charged or leading questions, and people don't want to respond to the lead laid out for them and want to in some way challenge the premise of the question. Sometimes the question doesn't make sense such that an answerer may feel the only valid response is "mu", or they feel it's an XY problem and refuse to answer the actual question and instead tackle the problem they think lies behind it: for example, "my friend keeps kicking me, what shin guards should I buy" would likely get answered with "tell your friend to stop kicking you."


Is there a term, phrase, or expression we use in English to concisely describe this type of response to a question, where people refuse to take on the question at face value and instead tackle some deeper premise behind it or take it on from a different angle?


I ask this because at some point circa 2014 it became commonplace for us to call these "frame challenges" or "challenging the frame of the question", but I can find no evidence at all that anyone except us calls it that. I've googled for both terms with and without quotes and only found design challenges, and Google Ngrams has questionable results — exceptionally slim usage of "challenge the frame" even by its standards, and no recorded usage of "frame challenge" whatsoever.


Sometimes our site's regulars who are familiar with this jargon will say at the top of answers "I'm going to challenge the frame of your question", which is a problem for random internet googlers or new users who may not know what that even means. I've seen people ask a handful of times what that means (most recently leading to a meta being asked).


I'd like to make sure that whatever we're calling this, it's something that actually makes sense to people, and isn't strictly internal technical jargon we invented between ourselves which nobody else understands.




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