PhronesisWe draw a structural distinction between two fundamentally different states both labeled confusion. Real confusion is genuine epistemic displacement from ground state: the person does not understand, is genuinely disoriented, and the confusion motivates resolution (Piaget's disequilibrium). Feigned confusion is strategic performance of not-knowing: the person understands but performs incomprehension as a social strategy — evading accountability, extracting help without reciprocity, maintaining power asymmetry through strategic incompetence.
We apply the Displacement Framework to formalize this distinction. The epistemic ground state S0_epistemic is defined as honest epistemic engagement: the capacity to accurately represent one's own epistemic state, knowing what one knows and acknowledging what one doesn't. W_feign is the wrong attractor of strategic epistemic performance: phenomenologically inverted from real confusion (no discomfort, no motivation to resolve, confusion is deployed rather than experienced), deployed selectively for inconvenient demands.
A third structure is analyzed: induced confusion — gaslighting (Abramson 2014) in which a perpetrator deliberately destabilizes the target's epistemic ground state; the target's confusion is real but externally manufactured. Nine formal propositions cover: S0_epistemic as honest epistemic engagement (P1), real confusion as legitimate displacement with Piaget's disequilibrium (P2), W_feign as strategic not-knowing wrong attractor with Goffman's impression management (P3), strategic incompetence as W_feign variant with Babcock et al. and household labor division (P4), power dynamics and institutional feigned confusion — corporate confusion about scientific evidence (P5), induced confusion as gaslighting (P6), the diagnostic challenge — behavioral markers of feigned confusion and epistemic injustice risk (P7), cumulative Phi across epistemic, relational, social, and institutional domains (P8), and return paths for real, feigned, and induced confusion (P9).