Sorry, I don't remember his views of these important issues. I agree that there is a massive risk that the explanations you give using these proverbs will be Just so-stories. I seem to recall that Elster is quite positive to these proverbs - that they somehow express "folk wisdom" - but I think that one should be quite suspicious of them. They are very often used as facile just-so stories and semantic stopsigns (thanks, polymathwannabe, for the term) to comfort your own prejudices , even though they perhaps need not be (Elster uses lots of examples from French essayists as La Rouchefoucauld and Montaigne, who arguably used them in an unusually interesting and thought-provoking way).