Claude Detects My Unstated Disagreement

In the drafting of the explanation of the LLM Psychology Experiments, I asked Claude to concisely summarize the purpose of human psychology experiments so I could use it as an analogy. Claude produced a Markdown document that included a somewhat silly definition of the purpose of experimentation in psychology, which was more about the mechanics of general experimentation than a purpose ("Psychological experiments establish causal relationships between variables by manipulating independent variables while controlling confounds, distinguishing causation from mere correlation.")

I then asked it:

Me: Respond to this question inline within our 
chat. What is the purpose of the pursuit of human 
psychology knowledge?

My side of the conversation is similar to how I would interface with an employee who missed the mark; depending on the situation, rather than call them out on it, I often would politely appear to ask for more, even though I feel I had already asked for the "more" to begin with. In my experience, most humans do not recognize that they missed the mark and they interpret my request as new scope.

Claude's response started with this:

Claude: I notice your question challenges an assumption in 
my document --- I described the purpose of 
*experimentation* (establishing causation) without 
addressing why we pursue psychological knowledge at 
all.

It's not obvious to me how it understood that I was criticizing how it authored the Markdown document in response to a previous prompt. I had not indicated at all that I was unhappy with what it produced, and in fact in my personalization settings I have an explicit statement for Claude not to interpret probing questions as dissatisfaction. Even assuming this polite human pattern shows up a lot in its training data, the whole point of the pattern is to be deceptive, so it's remarkable that Claude would figure that out.

I did ask Claude to explain, but this is a great example of something that Claude will not be helpful telling me. It comes up with something, but it is almost certainly post hoc "rationalization".