There was a debate of this sort around intentionality in multiagent systems a couple of decades ago. The basic problem was whether groups/teams can have intentions at all, or whether only individuals can, and group intention is really a set of supporting individual intentions
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The two "solutions" to problem ontologically, are to posit an idea of "Joint Intention" (as in, "China wants a trade war") where you attribute intentionality to collective, or "Intend that" as side intentionality to "intend to" (as in "Most Chinese citizens support a trade war")
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So to frame latter formally, if I were Chinese, I might "intend to" certain things (live my life, buy a cookie), and "intend that" certain other things happen via collective agency (China wins trade war etc). The difference is that latter strategy avoids reifying the collective.
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Now apply that strategy to subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Community behaviors become "intend that" behaviors expressed through Gemeinschaft modes.
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Contrast: "Californians believe in climate change and renewables" (intersubjectivity as communal subjectivity) "The average Californian wants renewable power and supports neighbors who do" (avoid reifying the collective "community")
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The ontological question is whether the linguistic reduction of a reified construction to a non-reified one loses something. This is quite hard to analyze. In general, the answer is that it does (apply a Ship of Theseus type replacement of elements argument to the collective).
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Now to the original question, the "public" is generally understood as some sort of aggregated mass of humans outside of a specific institutional context. They are being extra-institutionally human. Not even citizens (that's an institutional role involved in voting for example)
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So to ask if "public" can be reduced to "inter-institutionality" is to ask if so-called public behaviors are in fact reducible to a union of institutional behaviors. Ie explainable by combining all institutional roles (worker, citizen, neighborhood dweller, family person)
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Replying to @vgr
This feels framed utterly wrongly - commonwealth we the people http://www.onthecommons.org/work/what-commoning-anyway#sthash.K4t8Yr7m.22jsQXM0.dpbs …
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Replying to @Clivedurdle
It should feel wrong in that sense... I'm trying to question whether the idea of commonwealth has any real substance, or it's a construct like "god" that (speaking as an atheist) fails to exhibit any consequential agency outside of people's self-fulfilling belief in it
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Ie does "public" go away when people stop believing in it?
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Replying to @vgr
It is real :-) see Magna Carta book the article refers to. And commonwealth includes the biosphere and the universal systems that got us here tweeting with each other! Gods in contrast are theoretical constructs - being alive is authentic!
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