PhronesisChronic context-loading designates the compulsive provision of extensive background, framing, and explanatory preamble prior to any substantive communication. Where occasional contextualization is necessary and prosocial, the chronic form constitutes a wrong attractor W_CL — a self-maintaining basin organized around comprehension-anxiety management rather than actual information transfer.
This paper applies the displacement framework to model chronic context-loading against the ground state S^0 of calibrated contextual economy: the practice of providing exactly as much background as the listener requires, neither more nor less, delivered at the moment it is required. We identify the Background-Provision Architecture (BPA) as the generative mechanism: a pre-emptive explanation system activated by anticipated misunderstanding rather than actual misunderstanding, whose outputs substitute anxiety regulation for communicative function.
The Direct-Communication Foreclosure Basin (DCFB) describes the consequent structural inability to begin speaking without setup, even when setup is unnecessary, redundant, or actively counterproductive. Nine propositions formalize the attractor's structure, covering anxiety primacy, self-sealing via apparent clarity, listener burden transfer, identity capture as thorough-communicator, social cost invisibility, the necessary-versus-compulsive context distinction, the return path requiring mid-sentence interruption tolerance, gradual recalibration via feedback exposure, and the stability conditions of S^0.
The paper distinguishes calibrated contextualization — a genuine communicative virtue — from its compulsive shadow, and derives implications for therapeutic intervention and communicative re-education. 0.5em: context-loading, comprehension anxiety, wrong attractor, background-provision architecture, communicative compulsion, displacement framework, direct communication, calibrated economy, ground state