Hey Adam,
What you're describing sounds to me like it might essentially be social intelligence... almost everybody does this in some form (realizing that not everything is literal, but context dependent), and some highly socially intelligent people are much better at figuring out what people mean than others.
An additional step you might want to add in to your process is confirming fhat what you think they mean is what they actually mean by restating it in your own words, and saying something like, "so you're saying that..." This skill is essentially active listening.
One step further than this is also reaffirming their emotion (wow, it sounds like you're really (happy/angry/passionate/etc)... and one step further than that is reaffiriming WHY they said it (It seems like you really care about how this post comes across).
Of course, I'm just inferring what you mean here, without confirming, so I could be totally off base :).
Yes, social intelligence is the core of it, but a lot of the time it's not so much a matter of innate ability than of mindset and values. For a long while I had this strange idea that the overly-literal way of discussing, which assumed the form but not the function of rationality, was the right way of discussing, and the huge majority of people were just doing it wrong, and needed to be informed of the rules of ~rational~ debates. Looking back, I might have been rather frustrating to talk to. :)
But then I changed my mind and reframed debate as an action un...
Edit: I didn't realize this before writing the post, but what I'm referring to is The Principle of Charity.
Story
I was confused about Node Modules, so I did a bunch of research to figure out how they work. Explaining things helps me to understand them, and I figured that others might benefit from my explanation, so I wrote a blog post about them. However, I'm inexperienced and still unsure of exactly what's going on, so I started the blog post off with a disclaimer:
My friend said that it's a bad idea to do that. He said:
I interpreted what he said literally and basically responded by saying:
This was stupid of me. He didn't mean "claim that you're 100% sure of what you've written". He didn't mean "pretend that you're way more confident in what you've written than what you really are". He meant, "I think that it comes across as you being less confident than you actually are. And so I think you should reword it to better communicate your confidence."
I shouldn't have interpreted what he said so literally. I should have thought about and responded to what I thought he meant to say. (Although, he also should have been more precise...)
Thesis
People often interpret and respond to statements literally. Instead of doing this, it's often useful to think about and respond to what the other person probably meant.
For example, "If I interpret what you said literally, then A. But you probably meant X, so B. If you meant Y, then C."
Depending on how confident you are in your interpretation, you should probably respond to a variety of possibilities. Like if you're < 80% sure that you know what they meant, you should probably respond to possibilities that have at least a 5% chance of being what they meant. I'm not sure whether 80 and 5 are the right numbers, but hopefully it communicates the point.
Why don't people do this?
I see two likely reasons:
Practical considerations