PhronesisEpistemic cowardice — the practice of giving deliberately vague, uncommitted, or evasive responses to avoid the social costs of honest communication — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_EC in the landscape of courageous honesty. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as courageous honesty: communicating what one actually believes, calibrated to context but not evacuated of genuine content to avoid social discomfort.
W_EC is constituted by the vagueness-as-safety mechanism: conflict anticipation generates avoidance of honest assertion, and the vague or noncommittal response is experienced as safe because it cannot be challenged, disagreed with, or used as grounds for social reprisal. Three mechanisms maintain the attractor: conflict-anticipation as the primary driver, the false kindness frame (withholding honest feedback feels like care but withholds information the person needs), and reputation preservation (avoiding being the bearer of bad news).
W_EC is rigorously distinguished from tact (which says true things carefully) and appropriate reticence (which legitimately withholds information). Organizational and social costs include groupthink, poor decision quality, and accumulated unexpressed judgment that produces contempt rather than honest engagement. Nine formal propositions characterize these mechanisms alongside private-public self divergence, epistemic courage as trainable skill via the Aristotelian mean, and return paths through the SBI feedback model and radical candor practices.