Spreading the frontline until it snaps

By unfolding I mean “interrogating the conclusion to come up with an explanation of why it could be true.” What premises and reasoning chains leads to this conclusion? The explanation isn’t meant to prove that your conclusion was right. It is just a way of unpacking it.

By unfolding a claim into an explanation, you spread it on a “wider front” (to borrow a metaphor from Lakatos), so that the criticism has more targets.