What happens when conspiracy theories turn out to be true? In this presentation, I discuss the social semiotics of suspicion in Amman, Jordan by examining discursive commentaries on new construction projects. In these street-level conversations, local construction becomes linked to distant sources of plunder that investors acquire through violence, corruption, and occult knowledge. Then, drawing from interviews with Iraqi contractors who work in Amman’s illicit building trade, I confirm that these shared suspicions are basically correct: there really are secret flows of blood money smuggled out of warzones and transformed into apartments and shopping malls. This confirmation of rumor in fact suggests that popular interactional genres can serve as collaborative methods for reaching the truth in an environment saturated with deception. Moreover, careful ethnographic attention to the sites and settings in which these stories are told shows how the very act of disclosing hidden truths in public helps transcend the divisions of Amman's legally stratified and spatially segregated plural society. To explain this phenomenon, I turn to the philosophical tradition of the MENA region, which has long asserted that ordinary people can attain direct insight into insensible processes by means of reason, sensation, and imagination. Specifically, I deploy the medieval physician and philosopher Ibn Sina’s notion of “correct guessing” [husnu hadsin] (see Guta 2012, 400) to explain both how popular consciousness draws the hidden world of war and commerce into vivid presence, as well as why these moments of disclosure register in feelings of positive affect and social solidarity. Finally, I argue that ethnographers of the MENA region should take our interlocutors' stories about current events far more seriously, because they offer a critical reading of the relationship between states, markets, and conflict that possesses far greater explanatory power for making sense of places like Amman than generic Euro-American commentaries on “neoliberalism” ever could. Citations: Gutas, Dmitri 2012. “The Empiricism of Avicenna.” In Oriens 40:391-436.