by Peter Kahl, 2025-09-06; v3: 2025-09-13
This paper reconceptualises cognitive dissonance as an epistemic event: the affective signal of solitude and finitude at the edge of knowledge. Drawing on Schopenhauer, phenomenology, and ontology, it demonstrates that contradiction is not accidental but structural. Anxiety discloses this finitude, while fear accelerates collapse into conformity, obedience, or epistemic clientelism — yielding only illusory freedom. Endurance, by contrast, enables bounded freedom, fragile in isolation but sustainable through fiduciary–epistemic scaffolds: institutional duties of candour, accountability, and openness that dignify dependence. The argument unfolds across psychology, philosophy, and governance, showing how academia, corporations, journalism, politics, and frontier domains such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and climate governance require scaffolds that preserve contradiction. The conclusion is stark: survival in conditions of radical uncertainty depends on fiduciary–epistemic scaffolds strong enough to sustain plurality against the temptation of closure.
cognitive dissonance, epistemic event, epistemic clientelism, epistemic injustice, epistemic pluralism, epistemic agency, epistemic fear, epistemic anxiety, fiduciary duties, fiduciary–epistemic scaffolds, bounded freedom, solitude and finitude, ontology, conformity, obedience, authoritarianism, deliberative democracy, institutional design, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate governance, knowledge governance
- Version v3 ✅ latest
Kahl, P. (2025). Cognitive dissonance as epistemic event: Clientelism, bounded freedom, and the architecture of epistemic fear (v3). Lex et Ratio Ltd. GitHub: https://github.com/Peter-Kahl/Cognitive-Dissonance-as-Epistemic-Event DOI: https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.16174.37449
v1 published in London by Lex et Ratio Ltd, 2025-09-06.
v2 published in London by Lex et Ratio Ltd, 2025-09-10.
v3 published in London by Lex et Ratio Ltd, 2025-09-13.
© 2025 Lex et Ratio Ltd. The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work and to object to its derogatory treatment. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes with attribution and without modification.
Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .