I see. In that case, I don’t think it makes much sense to model scientific institutions or the human civilization as an agent. You can’t hope to achieve unanimity in a world as big as ours.
I mean, yes, but we still usually want to talk about collections of humans (like a “corporation” or “the economy”) producing highly optimized outputs, like pencils, even if no one human knows everything that must be known to make a pencil. If someone publishes bad science about the chemistry of graphite, which results in the people in charge of designing a pencil manufacturing line making a decision based on false beliefs about the chemistry of graphite, that makes the pencils worse, even if the humans never achieve unanimity and you don’t want to use the language of “agency” to talk about this process.
I see. In that case, I don’t think it makes much sense to model scientific institutions or the human civilization as an agent. You can’t hope to achieve unanimity in a world as big as ours.
I mean, yes, but we still usually want to talk about collections of humans (like a “corporation” or “the economy”) producing highly optimized outputs, like pencils, even if no one human knows everything that must be known to make a pencil. If someone publishes bad science about the chemistry of graphite, which results in the people in charge of designing a pencil manufacturing line making a decision based on false beliefs about the chemistry of graphite, that makes the pencils worse, even if the humans never achieve unanimity and you don’t want to use the language of “agency” to talk about this process.