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Conflicts over transparency and opacity in organizational, political, and scientific domains are usually treated as cultural or institutional disputes. This paper argues that such accounts miss a deeper structural mechanism: how epistemic systems interpret informational deviation. Polarity‑Valence Theory (PVT) explains this mechanism by showing how epistemic architectures assign valence—positive or negative interpretive value—according to their underlying polarity. Through Polarity‑Dependent Valence Assignment (PDVA), transparency‑aligned architectures treat deviation as signal or correction, while opacity‑aligned architectures treat it as defect or threat. These dynamics generate two norm species: Opacity Norm Theory (ONT), which stabilizes itself through controlled visibility and narrative constraint, and Transparency Norm Theory (TNT), which stabilizes itself through open flow, variation, and distributed verification. PVT shows these architectures are structurally incompatible: each requires suppressing the other’s equilibrium conditions. Transparency therefore appears to opacity‑aligned systems as rupture, while opacity appears to transparency‑aligned systems as epistemic corruption. This incompatibility explains why transparency reforms routinely fail in opacity‑aligned institutions, why openness initiatives provoke defensive responses, and why informational ecosystems polarize around competing definitions of epistemic stability. By integrating insights from organizational learning, symbolic power, preference falsification, risk psychology, and epistemic architecture, PVT offers a unified structural account of how polarity, valence, and norm definition shape the behavior and limits of epistemic systems.