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From the article:
In the linguistic sense, an expression is indexical if it refers by necessity to some particular state of affairs. “This guy arrived just now” depends on the person indicated and the time of speaking; it is highly indexical. Compare “The Prime Minister arrived at 5:15 p.m.” This is less indexical, but notice that the identity of the Prime Minister depends on the country, and of course we don’t know anything about the circumstances or place of arrival from the text: 5:15 p.m., but in what time zone?
Extremely non-indexical expressions often appear as health or science headlines. These are pretty much the opposite of indexicality:
Stanford Researchers: Average Human Body Temperature Dropping
How Puberty, Pregnancy And Perimenopause Impact Women’s Mental Health
Why is air pollution so harmful? DNA may hold the answer
Predatory-journal papers have little scientific impact
Can a healthy diet reduce your risk of hearing loss? Here’s what the research says
Notice that these refer to people in general, and vague concepts in general. They take the form of objective knowledge that is true in general, for all cases, globally, universally. They “see through” to the ultimate truth of matters, unsullied by the messy realities of particular people and situations. The kind of knowledge that non-indexical statements presume to convey is timeless, and describes all of humanity or the world in general. Indexical knowledge, on the other hand, refers to specific situations, times, people, and interactions. It does not purport to apply timelessly, in general, or to all people.
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Behind social science, there is the assumption that there must be a fact of the matter for various social science questions – a fact of the matter in a particular global, floating, timeless, objective sense. The problem is not that there is no fact of the matter in some particular case, though this is frequently true. The problem is the assumption that global knowledge can be found in every case, coupled with an easy certainty that one has found it when certain rituals are performed and certified.
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A Grain of Sand in Which to See Non-Indexicality
The Fact is just a little fact. It’s not a big deal, and probably nobody bases any serious policy decisions on it, although it is disseminated by policy advocates. If you search any term related to the domain of the fact on Google, Google will become concerned, and will offer you as the first result a hotline to call if you are personally having trouble in this domain. This semi-official hotline offers The Fact as a true fact, but it is not alone. CNN and The Guardian have both published articles claiming it is true. Different versions of The Fact are on offer in the United States, Canada, and the UK. Political groups sometimes tweet The Fact. People often tell The Fact to people involved in violent relationships.
The domain of the fact is domestic violence.
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Why these numbers? Why five, and why seven? It seems likely that Walker’s “three to five” and Hilberman and Munson’s “four or five” versions of The Fact reflect an oral tradition that existed during the late 1970s. The oral tradition now, as evidenced by the radio show and the news articles including oral citations of The Fact, seems to be anchored on the number 7 – and perhaps growing, as suggested by the “seven to nine” and “seven to eight” versions.
The Fact may be classified as a Policy Legend, according to “Policy Legends and Folklists: Traditional Beliefs in the Public Sphere,” by Gary Alan Fine and Barry O’Neill (Journal of American Folklore 123(488):150–178, 2010). A policy legend is
a traditional text that describes an institution’s action in a context that supports a particular policy choice or presents social conditions in a context that calls for governmental or collective action. It may be transmitted in oral or written form. It often has a historical theme, presenting a “fact” or set of “facts” relevant to an ongoing public debate
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Science Magic Tricks with the Assumption of Non-Indexicality
I’m not actually on a crusade against The Fact. There are millions like it, and many of them are a lot more harmful in their use and effect. I’m just annoyed with the assumption that non-indexical knowledge always exists and is easy to get, and the shady tricks that are pulled in order to supply this impossible information.
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“Word laundering” is the term that comes to mind with survey instruments in general.
These survey instruments, these facts, these studies are not special or unique – at least, I have no reason to suspect so. Domains that widely rely on survey instruments – depression inventories in mental health, happiness studies, education, nutrition – seem particularly vulnerable to taking words wrongly seriously.
And you can’t tell from looking just how bad a survey instrument is. A lot of the badness is how the instrument is used. Unwarranted inferences, suspicious groupings of unlike things, and layers of other tricks and malfeasances can be buried along the path from survey instrument to Fact. The problem is not the survey instrument itself. The problem is the expectation that this kind of knowledge can be had, and confidence that a survey is the way to get it.
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I see at least three possibilities toward a less cancerous form of inexact science.
The first is the attempt to restore lost context to celebrated results in the social sciences. [...]
The second possibility is to engage in forms of research that seek to locate and preserve the information that is indexical to a situation, rather than attempting to create global knowledge at all. That is the goal of the tiny field of ethnomethodology, for example. This kind of science is still rare. There’s a proverb to the effect that biology without Darwin was just stamp collecting. I don’t know how much hope there is for social science to stop hallucinating Darwins everywhere, and go back to honest stamp collecting, but I suspect that it is the only way toward social science knowledge that would be genuinely valuable. [...]
I think that a third alternative is honest fiction – stories that do not pretend to be reports of reality, but admit that they are the constructed products of minds.
In realms of guaranteed ignorance, what do the “experiments” offer (other than ritual sacrifice, if not of animals then of undergraduates’ time) that folktales or thought experiments with similar content couldn’t provide just as effectively? It is only folkloric and narrative value that the classical experiments retain.
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