PhronesisEmotional reasoning — the cognitive distortion in which emotional signal is treated as definitive evidence about external reality — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_ER in the landscape of calibrated appraisal. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as calibrated appraisal: the capacity to use emotional signals as important but non-definitive information about one's situation, recognizing that feelings are data about internal states without treating them as infallible evidence about external reality.
W_ER is constituted by the affective certainty principle: emotions feel certain and urgent in ways that cognitive propositions do not, generating an asymmetric epistemic weight that elevates feeling to fact. Classic exemplars include: 'I feel guilty therefore I must have done something wrong'; 'I feel worthless therefore I am worthless'; 'I feel afraid therefore there must be real danger'; 'I feel like a fraud therefore I am a fraud.' The self-sealing quality of the attractor is central: the person who feels worthless is unlikely to seek evidence against their worthlessness because the feeling of worthlessness feels more certain than any evidence.
Nine formal propositions characterize the affective certainty principle, the feeling-fact conflation, confabulation as post-hoc emotional endorsement, self-sealing dynamics, depression as basin deepener, somatic certainty, cultural validation, and return paths through CBT, ACT, and MBCT.