On Sep 27, 2014, at 6:12 PM, Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
While the artifact or substance has effects in the world, these effects do not involve agency.
This is as contradictory as it sounds. If people understand that a "bleaching agent" has the capacity to bleach regardless of human agency, an “agent” in that sense, can act under the conditions that enable it to act without the need for human agency.
By noting the second definition of “agent” without referring to the first in the OED definition of agent (not agency) I was trying to show that there was an accepted alternative to the view you insist on. I was focusing on the property of an “agent" not “agency”.
You wrote: "The full second definition is “b. A person or thing that operates in a particular direction, or produces a specified effect; the cause of some process or change. Freq. with for, in, of. Sometimes difficult to distinguish from the means or agency by which an effect is produced: cf. sense A. 3.”
To speak of a “bleaching agent” does not mean that the bleach specifies what properties it has, nor does bleach specify that which it will bleach. In this sense, a principal or actor uses a bleaching agent for purpose that the principal or actor specifies. “Bleach” has properties that affect the world around it without regard to specifications. A “bleaching agent” uses those properties on the instructions of a principal or actor. As the OED notes, this is sometimes “difficult to distinguish from the means or agency by which an effect is produced.”
You are contradicting yourself in the bolded statement. OED notes your difficulty.
Or so I believe,
Chuck
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