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Stefan_Schubert comments on Overly convenient clusters, or: Beware sour grapes - Less Wrong Discussion
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Good post. Jon Elster (whose works I much recommend; he has one book precisely on Sour Grapes) studies proverbs in his Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions. He notes that there are many contrary proverbs (i.e. of the form “Every S is P” and “No S is P.”) such as "out of sight, out of mind" and "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and "opposites attract" and "like attracts like". Elster argues, if I remember correctly, that these denote different mechanisms. According to this analysis, there would be one mechanism that goes from absence via say more loneliness to more love, whereas there is another that goes from absence to greater possibilities of meeting someone else to less love. Which one is the strongest in any individual case depends on various other factors.
If you're interested in this, I'd recommend reading those parts of Elster's book. In any case, I think that there is a lot to your analysis. Many of these proverbs are essentially devices to stop thinking (there is a LW term for this, right?). Rather than trying to weigh pros and cons people make themselves and others stop thinking by dropping a proverb. Many of them rhyme as well, which increases their effect.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/it/semantic_stopsigns/
How does Elster avoid the problem that if you have a toolbox of explanations that you can select from to explain anything, you actually aren't explaining anything? In extracts from his works online, I didn't see him considering the question of how to determine which explanation is actually true. It isn't addressed in the Wikipedia article you cited (btw, you need to escape the parentheses in its title for the link to work). The Hedström and Ylikoski paper that it cites only suggests simulating a proposed mechanism and seeing if it generates the observed phenomenon.
Or more shortly, how are true stories to be distinguished from Just-So stories?
On pages 16-20 of Explaining Social Behaviour: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Elster argues that one should refute rival explanations and show that additional (preferably novel) corollaries of the invoked explanation are observed. "These two criteria – refuting the most plausible alternatives and generating novel facts – are decisive for the credibility of an explanation."
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).
Ah, that's good to know. Thanks for the suggestion!