↩ ExploRational · A Catalogue of Divergent Rationality
explorational · a divergent move
The same conduct, honestly described twice, can carry opposite verdicts: thrift or avarice, courage or rashness, candor or cruelty. Sweep the honest wordings and watch which words are carrying your conclusion.
Quintilian catalogued the pivot two thousand years ago: call yourself wise rather than cunning, brave rather than over-confident, careful rather than mean, and the same man walks out of the sentence wearing the opposite verdict. The Renaissance rhetoricians drilled it under the name paradiastole — the figure that re-describes a vice as its neighbouring virtue, or a virtue as its neighbouring vice, while every fact stands still. Puttenham's English for it was the Curry-favell, the flatterer's figure. The drill teaches something unsettling and true: moral vocabulary comes in adjacent pairs — thrift beside avarice, courage beside rashness, candour beside cruelty — and somewhere along each arc the praise-word hands the same conduct over to the blame-word.
Quentin Skinner reads whole stretches of early modern politics as a war fought with this figure: rival descriptions of the same act, each honestly assertable, each smuggling in its own verdict. Hobbes took the weapon seriously enough to build a philosophy against it — "one man calleth wisdom, what another calleth fear; and one cruelty, what another justice." The divergent use turns the weapon around. Point it at your own conclusion: write the conduct bare, re-describe it honestly at the vice pole, the neutral middle and the virtue pole, and let the bench show you — by arithmetic on your own words — exactly which of them were carrying the verdict.
the signature instrument
Write the fact-core once. Re-describe it at three stations or more — the gate holds the readouts shut until three carry words. Everything below the gate — the diff, the fulcrum list, the containment flags, the audit's placement — is computed live from your tokens: an LCS diff, set arithmetic, a rough stem scan. The bench never scores a station as true.
The paradiastole rotator
01 the conduct — kept in two separate registers
02 the rotation rail — classic virtue ↔ vice neighbours, live-scanned against your words
03 the sweep — the same fact-core, honestly re-worded at each station
◆ = station drops fact-core words · the scan is rough by design: ~100 function words ignored, suffixes stripped (savings ≈ saved) · synonyms are not detected — kept will not match saved.
Exact set arithmetic on your tokens, order-free. These are the words doing the verdict's work; the neutral station usually owns none.
the pivot
A verdict word feels like a perception. You look at the decade of self-denial and simply see frugality, the way you see that the coat is grey. The rhetoricians' discovery is that the seeing was a choice among neighbours: the same decade, every fact intact, is honestly describable as thrift and honestly describable as avarice, and which word arrives first says as much about the describer as the described. The move opens the frame dimension by shifting: hold the conduct still and rotate the description around it, station by station, until the whole arc is visible at once.
Skinner's historical point gives the move its edge: societies change what they can praise partly by re-describing it, and the innovators are the ones who notice that every evaluative term is contestable at its margins. The sweep makes you innovator and audience at once. Its discipline is that every station must be honestly assertable — a wording a reasonable observer of these facts could sign. If you cannot write a sane vice-pole version of your hero's conduct, or a sane virtue-pole version of your rival's, you have not yet seen the conduct; you have seen your verdict.
what to try
Sweep a judgment you made this week — press blank bench. The hard part is the fact-core: what happened, observationally, before any verdict word. Then your current wording, then three honest stations. The gate stays shut until three stations carry words — and the fulcrum list will name the words your conclusion was standing on.
On the frugal preset, diff neutral against virtue pole: nothing is removed — the fact-core survives whole, and the verdict arrives as pure addition (frugal, disciplined, ). Then diff vice pole against virtue pole and watch saved show up on both sides: the diff is order-sensitive, so a word that merely moved reads as changed. The fulcrum list beside it ignores order — that is the corrective.
Delete ten years from your kindest station. The badge flips to core 5/7 ◆ and names what was dropped. A re-description that drops the facts is a different sentence — that flag is the bench's answer to the fear that sweeping is just spin.
the fulcrum words
Run the frugal sweep and the fulcrum list comes back almost empty: three words at the vice pole (miserly, grudging, hoarded), three at the virtue pole (frugal, disciplined, ), none at all in the neutral station. Twenty tokens per station, and the entire moral distance between contempt and admiration is carried by six of them. That is evaluative load made visible: a vocabulary choice, small enough to list.
The sweep makes verdicts owned, not impossible. Choosing frugal after seeing miserly fit the same facts obliges you to say why the virtue-word earns its place — what the saving was for, what it cost her, whether the proportion was sane. Courage and rashness divide on the odds and the cause; thrift and avarice on the end the money serves; candour and cruelty on whether the hearer could use the truth. Those reasons were always your actual judgment. Before the sweep they hid inside an adjective; after it, they stand in the open, where they can be argued with.
the honest bench
The diff is a longest-common-subsequence token diff, order-sensitive: a word that moves shows on both sides, which is why the order-free fulcrum list sits next to it. Fulcrum words are exact set arithmetic — lowercase the tokens, keep the ones that occur in exactly one station. The containment badge is the rough one, and says so: it drops a fixed list of about a hundred function words, strips suffixes with a crude stemmer so savings matches saved, then checks that every remaining fact-core word survives in every station. Synonyms defeat it — kept will not match saved — so treat the flag as a tripwire and re-word the core rather than argue with it. And it only checks that facts survive; what a station adds is beyond its reach. The fulcrum list identifies the additions; inspect them for the evaluative load.
The audit's placement is a shared-word score: content words your wording shares with a station, divided by the smaller set. Structural, and silent on truth — nearest means worded-like, nothing more. The bench holds no opinion about which station is the right description of the decade or the charge. It shows the arc, the fulcrum, and where you were standing; the judgment you re-issue after that is the entire point of the exercise.
the move ↔ the bench
| The move | The bench |
|---|---|
| the fact-core | what happened before the verdict — the sentence every station is obliged to keep. |
| a station | one honest wording of the same conduct, pitched at a chosen point on the vice–virtue arc. |
| the pair lexicon | virtue and vice as neighbours — the classical axes a re-description can ride, from Quintilian's list onward. |
| the diff | what actually changed between two verdicts, token by token, and nothing else. |
| the fulcrum words | the words that occur in exactly one station — where the conclusion lives. |
| the audit | the verdict re-held with open eyes: its station named, its fulcrum listed, its owner on record. |
how this opening fails
risk · flattening
The catalogue's named risk for this move. Run the rotation a few times and every description starts to look like spin, every verdict like a vocabulary accident — so all verdicts are equal, so nothing can be said. The bench builds the rebuttal in. The containment check holds every station to the same fact-core, and the fulcrum list shows how little separates the wordings — which means the shared facts are doing most of each sentence's work, and the remaining choice is small, nameable and arguable. Wordings can still strain against those facts: hoarded makes a claim about her relation to the money that further facts — what the saving was for — could falsify. The sweep sharpens judgment by isolating exactly what must be defended; the flattened reading throws away the isolation and keeps only the vertigo.
risk · a blade pointed outward
Paradiastole's history is mostly a weapon aimed at other people: the opponent's prudence becomes cowardice, his firmness obstinacy, her generosity profligacy — while the speaker's own conclusions stay un-swept. Used that way the rotator is the Curry-favell again, with extra steps. The bench assumes the opposite target: the wording box asks for the verdict you currently hold, and the audit ends by asking what you still hold once its fulcrum is in view. If the only conclusions you ever rotate are other people's, you are not performing the move; you are performing on its stage.
Sweep the honest wordings, and your conclusion will show you the two words it was standing on.
can you use it?
RECOGNITION — Which of these is the sweep? A: you rewrite a rival's "principled stand" as "rigid obstruction" in a memo. B: you write your conduct's bare fact-core, then word it honestly at vice pole, neutral, and virtue pole. C: you argue the opposite verdict from a different set of facts.
B. A is the Curry-favell — one direction, aimed outward, your own verdict un-swept. C changes the facts; the sweep holds them still and rotates only the wording.
THE NEAREST NEIGHBOR — What separates a sweep from spin?
Every station keeps the whole fact-core and is honestly assertable — including the pole that damns your own side. Spin drops facts, or rotates only outward.
PRODUCTION — You are about to confront a colleague you have labeled "careless" over a buggy release. Run the sweep before looking.
Core: he shipped with two known bugs after the deadline passed. Vice: sloppy, indifferent. Neutral: the core alone. Virtue: pragmatic, unwilling to slip twice. Fulcrum: sloppy against pragmatic. Yours works if every station keeps the full fact-core and your verdict words appear in exactly one station.