PhronesisCompulsive meaning-making is a cognitive-epistemic attractor in which uncertainty-elimination drives the interpretive system away from its ground state of calibrated interpretive openness toward premature, rigid, and self-reinforcing narrative closure. We formalize this displacement using a dynamical framework in which the ground state S^0 represents calibrated openness to ambiguity, the displacement field D() measures the degree of epistemic urgency driving premature interpretation, and the accumulated displacement = D()\,d characterizes the depth of entrenchment in the wrong-attractor basin.
The narrative-override architecture—a self-reinforcing loop in which selected interpretations suppress competing hypotheses—is analyzed mechanistically. We introduce the concept of the mystery-foreclosure basin: the region of interpretive state space in which wonder is structurally unavailable because the closure mechanism has sealed off the conditions for genuine inquiry. Nine formal propositions characterize the geometry of this attractor and the conditions for return to S^0.
Exit dynamics are formalized through the concept of negative capability as a return path, following Keats's original formulation. We connect our framework to empirical literatures on cognitive closure, apophenia, conspiratorial cognition, and religious fundamentalism, arguing that compulsive meaning-making constitutes a unifying construct across these otherwise disparate phenomena.
The therapeutic and epistemic implications of maintaining calibrated interpretive openness as a standing cognitive posture are discussed.