When Certainty Is an Artifact: Keyword Lexicon Blindness and the (Mis)Measurement of Rhetorical Stance

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Original abstract

Can a statistically significant, large-effect-size finding in computational social science be entirely an artifact of the measurement instrument? We present a case where the answer appears to be yes. Analyzing 85 interviews across four public intellectuals (2016--2026), we find a robust negative-affect/emphatic-certainty lexical co-occurrence pattern under keyword-based scoring ($r = 0.72$--$0.93$, $p < 0.01$ for all four speakers). Replacing keyword counting with LLM-based zero-shot semantic classification on the complete diarized corpus (32,625 sentences) dramatically reduces this correlation: Dalio's $r = 0.851$ drops to $r = 0.206$, with two speakers showing negative $r(\text{neg}, \text{emphatic})$ and one showing null. In contrast, the LLM reveals a strong negative-hedging coupling across speakers -- Rogoff's $r(\text{neg}, \text{hedged}) = 0.875$ ($p = 0.001$) and Zeihan's $r(\text{neg}, \text{hedged}) = 0.722$ ($p = 0.008$) -- consistent with the conventional expectation that pessimistic discourse attracts hedging, not certainty. Sentence-level error analysis traces this discrepancy to three structural failure modes in keyword lexicons -- syntactic blindness, polysemy blindness, and categorical absence -- illustrated through cases where keyword counting inverts semantic meaning (e.g., ''never absolutely totally confident'' scored as high-certainty). We argue that keyword lexicons measure a universal lexical co-occurrence tendency -- negative discourse naturally attracts emphatic vocabulary -- that is orthogonal to, and can systematically invert, rhetorical stance. Treating keyword counts as measurements of epistemic certainty is a category error: a finding that appears to be about a speaker's psychology may be entirely about the counting of words.

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