Structural Uncertainty and the Conditions of Transformative Agency

Transformative agency is not a fixed human endowment. The capacity to perceive that existing frameworks have become inadequate and to translate such perception into action depends on infrastructural conditions that can be eroded. This paper develops an account of how conversational infrastructure shapes the pre-reflective capacities on which transformative agency depends. Central to this account is structural uncertainty, an environmental quality that keeps open the question of whether established modes of engagement remain adequate. Among the settings where such uncertainty operates, sense-making conversations play a distinctive role. Characterised by productive uncertainty rather than efficient resolution, they constitute infrastructure through which societies maintain their capacity for ethical transformation. Such conversations are now increasingly mediated by large language models optimised to provide comprehensive responses. The very features that make these systems feel helpful may foreclose the exploratory space ethical inquiry requires. The paper traces how infrastructure shapes habits of attention, drawing on the ‘kind environment’ thesis while identifying its limits for understanding capacities that involve perceiving framework inadequacy. These limits become salient in institutional contexts where design choices shape conditions for transformative agency, from judicial concepts like mercy to professional settings that support exploratory dialogue. The analysis concludes by examining interventions that could preserve these conditions, including temporal designs that resist premature resolution and participatory architectures enabling collective shaping of conversational infrastructure.