What is Hazard Semantics?
Hazard Semantics is the study of meaning behavior - how meaning is formed, fused, propagated, stabilized, and fails across complex systems that include environmental, infrastructural, human, and AI-generated signals. It defines meaning as a type of critical interpretive infrastructure and establishes the governance principles necessary to maintain coherence and prevent semantic hazards.
Meaning is now created by machines, fused across domains, propagated automatically, and used to make decisions with real-world consequences. Yet meaning has no rules, no boundaries, no lineage requirements, and no stability standards.
The Interpretive Breakdown Archive
A curated research archive documenting structural conditions under which interpretation becomes unsafe when meaning is forced to fuse before stability thresholds are met.
Modern risk increasingly emerges in the space between institutional silos.
A valley fills with wildfire smoke; NOAA, USGS, and EPA each report accurately within their own domains (wind + elevation + AQI), yet public understanding collapses once those signals are fused under time pressure. Meaning is asked to carry cross-domain coherence it was never designed to hold.
This is a semantic hazard: when correct data produces unstable meaning.
Hazard Semantics defines the problem space and highlights the need for semantic governance.
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