Compulsive Caveat-Adding as Certainty-Avoidance Wrong Attractor: The Hedge-Compulsion Architecture, Qualification-Spiral Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Assertive Communication

Compulsive caveat-adding (CCA) designates a stable, cross-situational pattern in which virtually every assertion is surrounded by qualifiers, exceptions, hedges, and self-undermining disclaimers — not because the assertions are genuinely uncertain but because certainty itself has become aversive. The compulsive caveat-adder does not qualify because the evidence is thin; they qualify because the act of asserting without qualification generates a specific form of anticipatory dread: the dread of being wrong, of being caught in an overstatement, of having committed to a position that could be refuted or held against them.

This paper reconceptualises CCA within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_CCA in the landscape of assertion and communicative engagement. The ground state S^0 is Calibrated Assertive Communication: the capacity to match assertion strength to actual epistemic warrant, stating things with confidence when warranted and with uncertainty when genuinely uncertain. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the W_CCA basin: (1) caveat-as-error-preemption, in which each qualifier reduces the speaker's perceived exposure to refutation, creating strong iterative reinforcement for qualification-adding; (2) hedging-as-intellectual-honesty, in which excessive qualification is subjectively experienced as rigorous, careful thinking rather than avoidance, producing ego-syntonic entrenchment; and (3) over-qualification-as-approval-management, in which pre-emptive hedging accommodates potential disagreement before it arises, functioning as a conflict-avoidance mechanism operating at the level of individual sentences.

The central formal result is the Caveat Paradox: the more caveats one adds to avoid being wrong, the less one says anything worth being right about. Formally, we define assertion strength A(s) for a statement s, and demonstrate that compulsive caveating drives A(s) 0 for all statements s, making every assertion informationally equivalent to silence. Nine propositions formalise the attractor structure, its developmental roots in environments where confident assertions were punished or where error was catastrophically costly, and the return paths available through assertion practice, caveat-counting and reduction, and the explicit decoupling of epistemic accuracy from interpersonal conflict-avoidance.