• See Wesley Salmon’s Causality and Explanation for a collection of very provocative articles regarding causation (responding to Hume, addressing issues such as proximity, etc.) in the context of scientific study.
• Volokh’s remark, “The trick is to look beyond the metaphor to the actual mechanism by which the ‘slippage’…happens…. By identifying this concrete mechanism…we can better evaluate the actual likelihood of slippage…,” identifies a neat “trick” that can’t be accomplished. Looking behind a metaphor to its concrete mechanism…reveals another metaphor. See, e.g., I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, and Jacques Derrida, White Mythology.
• Earlier today, before reading this post and for the first time, I heard of Hirschman’s book, and I discovered that virtually every copy is checked out from local libraries! Although not a PUCI, it is a strange phenomenon, this sudden ubiquity of a formerly obscure reference.
• Another example of a PUCI, although a non-legal one, would be the matter of reliability of information gleaned from the ‘net. We often view the ‘net purely in terms of its effect on our ability to absorb increasing amounts of information, i.e., as a unidirectionally oriented expanding supply heaped on users, who respond by wasting time, or refusing to spend more time, or organizing their time to optimize their reception of the glut. But the echo chamber or feedback mechanism effect seems to be working here, too. Criteria of reliability shift (some would say decline) as one way to accommodate surplus information, more of which is proferred according to those adjusted criteria.

Perhaps I’m trying to tie together too many ideas here…but it would be of some interest to do a “typology of futurology,” since so many policy arguments seem to depend on predictions of what will happen given some change in the law.

Although I’m still trying to get my head around the concept of PUCI, for now I’ll say my favorite is a butterfly flapping its wings.