PhronesisCompulsive fact-checking occupies a peculiar position in the landscape of epistemic dysfunction: it wears the costume of epistemic virtue while enacting its opposite. We propose a formal framework in which compulsive fact-checking constitutes a wrong attractor W in cognitive state space — a dynamically stable configuration that masquerades as certainty-seeking while systematically preventing the attainment of calibrated epistemic confidence, here designated the ground state S^0.
Using a displacement formalism, we model the psychological distance D() from S^0 at each cognitive moment, and the total displacement burden = D()\,d accumulated through sustained checking behavior. We analyze the verification-override architecture by which each checking act temporarily reduces surface anxiety while deepening structural doubt, and characterize the trust-foreclosure basin as the geometric region of state space from which unaided return to S^0 is suppressed.
Nine formal propositions govern these dynamics. We conclude with exit conditions: the tolerability of uncertainty, the restoration of trust in prior evidence, and the cultivation of calibrated epistemic confidence as an active disposition rather than an achieved fact. The framework integrates with literatures on OCD, health anxiety, misinformation anxiety, and epistemic virtue theory.