PhronesisCompulsive sentence-finishing—the habitual anticipation and oral completion of another speaker's utterance before it terminates—constitutes a dynamical wrong attractor in collaborative communicative exchange. Using the displacement framework introduced in the Phronesis Issues series, we formalize the phenomenon as a system displaced from its ground state S^0 of calibrated collaborative exchange into a high-cost attractor basin we term completion-capture.
We define a displacement cost function D() whose integral = D()\,dt accumulates over repeated override episodes, progressively deepening the attractor basin and foreclosing receptive-listening modes. The framework yields nine formal Propositions (P1–P9) characterizing: the attractor's structural properties, the displacement cost landscape, the foreclosure mechanism by which receptive listening becomes inaccessible, phase transitions between exchange regimes, intervention geometry, recovery dynamics, systemic relationship effects, and the ethical topology of anticipatory override.
We identify the key asymmetry between the rapid basin-deepening dynamics and the slow recovery trajectory, and propose a minimal intervention set—the Calibration Return Protocol—that exploits curvature discontinuities in the displacement landscape to restore proximity to S^0. The paper concludes by situating compulsive sentence-finishing within the broader class of anticipatory-override wrong attractors and noting implications for collaborative design, therapeutic practice, and relational ethics.