Our Conception of Competitiveness: Unified but Useless?

Abstract

‘Competitive’ is one of the most commonly and confidently used words in sports. I argue that, while this term does have necessary and sufficient conditions, it is still a fairly useless one. Knowing someone is competitive does not tell one about the type of desire to win, the type of quantity of that desire, and the precise way in which one wants to be better. We also don’t know who a person feels a desire to beat, when winning actually becomes a goal, and what kind of knowledge and talents that person has at their disposal. Without this information, knowing someone is competitive tells you very little.

Keywords:

• competitiveness
• desire
• winning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This focus on what we mean when we speak of a competitive psychology also makes my focus quite different than most philosophers of sport who write on competition. Most philosophers dealing with the topic write on either the metaphysics of what makes something a competition, or on the ethics of whether winning is a justifiable aim.

2. Note that I’m defining what might be called ‘occurent competitiveness’ – an active desire to do better than one’s competition. There’s also what might be called ‘standing competitiveness’ – having a psychological makeup such that this state would become occurrent in the right circumstances. So one might refer to someone as a competitive lacrosse player (in the standing sense), even if that person is now sleeping, or eating lunch, not thinking of lacrosse at all.

3. I’ve been emphasizing what our hearing of someone’s competitiveness doesn’t tell us. The question of what people do tend to expect from competitive (perhaps by relying on stereotypes) is an interesting empirical question. So is the question of which type of competitiveness is actually statistically most common.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Todd Jones

Philosophy Department, University of Nevada – Las Vegas, UNLV 4505, Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA.