Semantic Posteriority: Why Justifications Do Not Generate Conclusions

Across domains—moral judgment, legal reasoning, academic inquiry—a pervasive assumption governs our understanding of justification: that arguments generate the conclusions they defend. This paper argues the opposite: conclusions originate from prelinguistic insights (𝑅), while arguments are post-hoc protocols anchoring those insights in public space (𝑆). Traditional criticism commits a category mistake, conflating accessibility failure (blocked argumentative path) with falsity of conclusion (absence of truth). To formalize this principle, we propose the R→e→S/U Observation Framework, treating Generalized Semantics (𝑆) and Interactional Utility (𝑈) as parallel projections of Expression (𝑒) along different dimensions, thereby ontologically decoupling the spurious causal chain between justification and insight. The framework’s core contribution lies in two previously missing tools. First, Semantic Drift (𝐷𝑆𝑈) as a measurable metric transforms the “language-utility gap” from phenomenological intuition into arithmetizable deviation, enabling precise distinction between expressive drift (transmission failure) and strategic drift (manipulative design). Second, systematic diagnosis of Modal Truncation explains why traditional discourse analysis fails in highadversarial environments—when power operates through 𝑆𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑡/𝑆𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑡 separation, approaches focusing solely on verbal text cannot capture actual utility-generation mechanisms. Through inclusive diagnosis of Grice, Stalnaker, Davidson, and Haidt, we demonstrate: logic functions not as a generator of truth, but as an honest measurer of semantic drift.