PhronesisCompulsive vagueness is the systematic, habituated deployment of imprecise, ambiguous, or deliberately uncommitted language as a strategy for avoiding the accountability that clear expression entails. This paper formalizes compulsive vagueness as a wrong attractor in the state space of communicative behavior: a self-reinforcing dynamic basin from which the speaker cannot easily exit once entrained, and which forecloses access to calibrated precise expression—the ground state S^0.
We introduce the displacement field D() measuring deviation from S^0 and the integrated displacement = D()\,dt as an index of chronic vagueness load. Nine formal propositions characterize the attractor's geometry, the basin's trapping dynamics, and the conditions for return. We analyze the ambiguity architecture through which vagueness loops are maintained—hedging rituals, deniability scaffolding, metacommentary deflection—and describe the clarity-foreclosure basin as a region of state space in which the cost of precision is perceived to grow super-linearly with displacement.
Exit dynamics require discontinuous reattunement rather than smooth gradient descent. The paper situates compulsive vagueness within broader pathologies of commitment-avoidance: passive-aggression, conflict evasion, bureaucratic language, and epistemic cowardice. We conclude with a framework for recovery of commitment-capacity and return to calibrated precise expression. Keywords: compulsive vagueness, wrong attractor, commitment-avoidance, ambiguity architecture, clarity-foreclosure, calibrated expression, epistemic cowardice