Consensus

Consensus in distributed systems is the problem of achieving agreement among multiple agents about a shared state or value, even when some agents may fail or behave maliciously. The problem is central to computer science — where it appears in distributed systems and blockchain protocols — but it is structurally identical to the problem of coordinating meaning in interpretive communities, where no central authority decides which readings are legitimate. The consensus problem reveals that agreement is not a discovery but an achievement: it must be engineered through protocols, incentives, or shared priors that constrain the space of possible disagreement.