On Thu, June 6, 2013 10:38, Barkmeyer, Edward J wrote: (01)
>> EJB
>> > The distinction between social contracts and scientific laws, which
>> > neither of us mentioned, is that the purpose of most scientific "laws"
>> > is to predict the behavior of individual phenomena (on some scale). (02)
>> JS
>> I certainly agree that the second half of the sentence is true
>> about the laws of science.
>> But both I and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, believe
>> that *exactly* the same principle holds
>> for every law passed by any legislature: (03)
>> OWH
>> > The primary rights and duties with which jurisprudence busies itself
>> > again are nothing but prophecies... a legal duty so called is nothing
>> > but a prediction that if a man does or omits certain things he will be
>> > made to suffer in this or that way by judgment of the court. (04)
>> Source: http://constitution.org/lrev/owh/path_law.htm (05)
> Can you really not distinguish between:
> Drivers stay on their side of the centerline
> And
> If a driver does not stay on his side of the centerline, he is
> prosecuted for reckless driving.
> ? (06)
Of course, the vast majority of times the antecedent occurs,
the consequent does not. (07)
Laws such as speed limits on major highways are not only
routinely violated, but such violations are
routinely ignored by the police (and speed cameras!) until the
the extent of the violation is over N mph/kmph over the posted
limit. In places where N is high (e.g., I 270 in MD, where the
limit is 55 MPH for historic political reasons N is 20 mph) the
police regularly drive over N above the limit and people from
out of the area slow down traffic by assuming a far lower N. (08)
Different jurisdictions have different enforcement priorities.
Traffic laws are differentially enforced in Rome, Paris, Delhi,
and San Francisco. Building codes, minimum wage laws,
intellectual property laws, and laws against bribery are enforced
to far different extents in different countries around the world. (09)
So the law as a predictor of human activity (as OWH claims)
needs to be greatly modified by context. The law can be used
as an excuse to arrest someone even if 99.99% of observed
violations are ignored. The law can be presented to a jury
to induce them to come to a verdict. (010)
It seems to me that it is far better to model social laws as
proscriptions -- and then to derive predictions from them based i
on context, than to skip the proscriptive definition and jump straight
to their predictive force. (011)
So, basically, i agree with Ed. (012)
-- doug foxvog (013)
> Perhaps I misunderstood the way in which you intended your observation
> about drivers staying to their side of the centerline.
> I understood you to say that one could assume that the "social law"
> expressed in the first sentence above is true, in the same way that one
> can assume that a body at rest will stay at rest until acted on by an
> outside force. What Holmes is talking about is clearly the second. As
> Ron Ross has said many times many ways, the first sentence is not a
> 'structural rule' (axiom), because in practice it can be 'violated'. The
> proper rule is 'operational' (deontic): "Drivers MUST stay on their side
> of the centerline," and Holmes' aphorism is about 'enforcement', which
> (according to Ron) is separable from the rule itself (and I concur).
>
> Frankly, I doubt that the second sentence above is even true in the
> aggregate, but then Chief Justice Holmes probably had rather more
> significant laws in mind.
> If we can agree that the second sentence above is at least closer to the
> kind of predictions made by the "laws of science", we will have come to an
> understanding.
>
> -Ed
>
> While we are quoting the aphorisms of engineers, I like this one:
> "The difference between theory and practice in practice is greater
> than the difference between theory and practice in theory."
> -- unattributed (via John Dilley at HP)
>
>
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