This glossary defines key terms used in the field of Biasology. These terms were originally introduced and defined in the Biasology preprint, and are included here as a living reference.
These terms reflect the language of survivor logic, epistemic repair, and the reframing of mental health symptoms as sane adaptations to a disordered system. Biasology is not a diagnosis. It is a lens.
Authority by Distance
The presumption that someone who is more "objective," less affected, or professionally credentialed should be believed over someone with lived experience. Often masked as neutrality, but functions as power consolidation.
Biasology
The study and naming of how systemic bias harms people through diagnosis, framing, and interpretation. A field of epistemic liberation and survivor logic. Biasology reframes symptoms as intelligent adaptations to structural and relational harm.
Compliance Logic
A survival pattern in which individuals over-accommodate to systems that harm them in order to avoid further punishment. Often misread as cooperation, but rooted in coercion, fear, or past retraumatization.
Containment Playbook
A set of tactics used by systems or institutions to neutralize dissent without accountability. Common techniques include performative validation, vague encouragement, redirection to process, and compliments that defuse critique.
Counter-Narrative
A story told from within lived experience that contradicts dominant diagnostic, institutional, or professional frameworks. Counter-narratives reclaim voice and challenge imposed interpretations.
Diagnostic Gaze
The internalized sense of being observed, framed, or interpreted through a clinical or institutional lens. In Biasology, the diagnostic gaze describes how people adjust their behavior, language, or appearance in anticipation of how systems might pathologize them.
Diagnostic Override
When a system or professional insists on a clinical interpretation that replaces the person’s self-understanding. Often justified as objectivity, this act flattens lived experience and imposes an external narrative that can erase truth.
Diagnostic Weaponry
The use of diagnoses, labels, or clinical language to control, discredit, or contain someone’s experience. May occur subtly through documentation or overtly through institutional power.
Emotional VAT
"Value-Added Tax" on emotional labor. The cost of offering vulnerability, truth, or presence in a space that doesn’t reciprocate. Often accumulates in professional, therapeutic, or family systems.
Engineering of Self
The internal restructuring a person does to appear legible, compliant, or palatable to systems of power. This can include language adaptation, emotional suppression, and performance of recovery or professionalism.
Epistemic Harm
The injury caused when someone’s way of knowing is dismissed, misinterpreted, or structurally disqualified. Includes testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and the silencing of survivor narratives.
Help as Control
When systems offer support in ways that reinforce compliance, erase autonomy, or mask surveillance. Framed as care, but functions as containment.
Hermeneutical Injustice
A concept developed by philosopher Miranda Fricker. Refers to the harm caused when people lack the language or framework to make sense of their experience. In Biasology, this shows up when survivors feel something deeply but are unable to express it in terms the system will recognize or respect.
Learned Burnout Avoidance
A protective shutdown response developed from chronic overwhelm, medical gaslighting, or unsustainable expectations. Not laziness or resistance. A form of embodied memory and wisdom.
Legibility Performance
The effort required to appear understandable or credible to outsiders or systems of care. Often performed by neurodivergent or trauma-impacted people as a form of safety or access strategy.
Neurodivergent Epistemology
A mode of knowing shaped by brains that resist conformity, linearity, or dominant social cues. This epistemology values pattern recognition, emotional depth, and nonlinear synthesis over traditional academic logic.
Post-Diagnostic Thinking
The clarity that emerges when a person reclaims their mind and story from the authority of a diagnosis. This phase often includes reinterpreting past experiences through a lens of dignity, agency, and trauma-informed insight.
Translation Tax
The emotional and cognitive labor required to translate one's inner experience into socially acceptable or clinically legible language in order to receive help. A toll paid most often by neurodivergent, disabled, or trauma-trained minds.