We can't impute intent to a chimera, all we can do is observe the revealed preferences of real people.

Kind of interesting. From The Idea of Congressional Intent is Incoherent by Alex Tabarrok. This is really more a philosophical and legal discussion but it has broader application.

Now seems like an apposite time to remember, Congress intends no more than Congress smiles. As Ken Shepsle put it in his classic paper Congress is a “They,” not an “It”:

Legislative intent is an internally inconsistent, self-contradictory expression. Therefore, it has no meaning. To claim otherwise is to entertain a myth (the existence of a Rousseauian great law giver) or commit a fallacy (the false personification of a collectivity). In either instance, it provides a very insecure foundation for statutory interpretation.

Shepsle’s point is that Arrow’s impossibility theorem shows that not only do collectives not have preferences they can’t even be understood as if they had preferences. As I wrote earlier:

Suppose that a person is rational and that we observe their choices. After some time we will come to understand their choices in terms of their underlying preferences (assume stability–this is a thought experiment). We will be able to say, “Ah, I see what this person wants. I understand now why they are choosing in the way that they do. If I were them, I would choose in the same way.”

Arrow showed that when a group chooses, there are no underlying preferences to uncover–not even in theory. In one sense, the theorem is trivial. We know or should always have known that a group doesn’t have preferences anymore than a group smiles. What Arrow showed, however, is that without invoking special cases we can’t even rationalize group choices as if leviathan had preferences.

In children's literature circles, dominated as they often are by the further reaches of academic fashions, there is a tendency to characterize groups (gender, religion, race, age, class, etc.) and attribute desires to those putative groups.

There are certainly empirical correlations of one sort or another and I have no particular beef with that reality. "I yam what I yam and tha's all what I yam" as the immortal Popeye used to say. It is the attribution of desires to an otherwise heterogeneous group that sets me on edge.

This attribution of motive and philosophical existence often takes the form of "We (whatever group) need more books about . . ." All well and good but who is this metaphorical "we"? Are "we" going to buy the book? Are "we" going to read the book? Somebody will but not "we" because "we" is just a conjured metaphor with no wallet or smiling eyes.

As Tabarrok says, "there are no underlying preferences to uncover."

We can, for example, empirically say that the primary readers of Young Adult literary fiction are actually middle aged women. We do survey's, we obtain data, we observe purchasing trends.

We can't from that piece of empirical knowledge then say that the group we designate as middle aged women prefer YA literary fiction, or that they want more literary fiction. There is no corporal substance or cognitive attribution that can be made to the "they."

Publisher's might usefully exploit the knowledge that the demographic of middle aged women are the primary consumers of YA literary fiction in shaping their marketing and advertising campaigns but they would never (or at least never if they want to stay in business) make the mistake of assuming that middle aged women want more YA literary fiction. Lots of middle aged women readers might individually wish for and choose to read more YA literary fiction, but "they" don't make that decision. Betty makes that decision and Allison and Juanda, etc. To assume otherwise both entertains "a myth" and deprives those middle aged female readers of their agency.

We can't impute intent to a chimera, all we can do is observe the revealed preferences of real people.