In a nutshell: Black provides top-down empirical generalizations about how law varies with social characteristics. But this is highly suggestive that there’s some bottom-up explanation in terms of more basic human tendencies. That is, his generalizations really look like they result from underlying psychological phenomena rather than merely emerging at the societal level.

Discussion, leaning improvidently on a single extended metaphor: Reading Black’s piece and listening to Moglen talk today, the analogy between Black’s observations and something from high school science kept jumping out at me.

Remember the gas laws? These were empirical observations made by European dudes experimenting with bottles and glass tubing around the 1700s to try to describe gases. Their observations (where other factors remain constant):

• Boyle’s: Pressure varies inversely with volume.
• Charles's: Volume varies directly with temperature.
• Gay-Lussac’s: Pressure varies directly with temperature.

There was no explanation why these generalizations worked: they just did. But of course one wondered. Then came kinetic theory—it’s atoms bouncing around! Do the math and it follows that although individual atoms are unpredictable, these generalizations about their big-picture behavior in groups always hold.

Now compare to some of Black’s observations:

• Law varies directly with rank.
• Centripetal law varies inversely with radial distance.
• Law varies directly with integration.

That these generalizations hold so consistently across cultures suggests that something fundamental underlies them. (Of course, Black’s observations very well might actually be emergent phenomena at the societal level—I just don’t see why to think they are.) But what does underlie these observations? What tendencies of the individuals running around might produce these big-picture results?

I’d speculate it’s the tendencies we’ve been discussing all along (following scripts, shirking from cognitive dissonance, etc.), which I tried to characterize (perhaps idiosyncratically) as decision-making rules of thumb in GregJohnsonFirstPaper.

In concluding: Does this characterization of Black's observations seem reasonable? If so, what might underlie them? If not, why might Black's observations better be characterized as something else (such as independent principles)?

-- GregJohnson - 04 Mar 2009