What is the questioners line of reasoning if they haven't made any claims? If they have made a mixture of claims and questions then they can have flaws but its misleading to call them "questioners" at that point, since they've done more than just ask questions.

> Their stubbornness in pursuing a contradiction only succeeds if there is a contradiction they were already aware of

I don't think this is true at all. You can recognize a statement of the form "X is not X" without having come across it before. As for the stubbornness, this can apply to both parties: the contradiction only appears when the answering party can't bring themselves to say "I don't know", "I assume", or "I don't have time for this"