The We-Perspective on the Racing Sailboat

Abstract

Racing in sailboats is for the most part a team sport, sailed in everything from two-person dinghies to super-maxi boats that require well over a dozen crew. Sailing is challenging enough but crewed racing boats present special challenges. Successful sports teams are able to adopt what is known as the we-perspective, forming intentions and making decisions, somewhat as a unified mind does, to achieve their goals. In this paper I consider what is involved in establishing and maintaining the we-perspective on a racing sailboat. 1 Gilbert's account of plural subjectsThere has been a lot of work in the last 30 years on collective intentionality, the phenomenon of treating complex systems, themselves composed of intentional agents, as subjects of propositional attitudes such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Such group minds, as they are sometimes thought of, include corporations, clubs, religious organizations, military units, and more transient associations assembled for some immediate goal or purpose. Following standard usage in this literature I will call propositional attitudes ascribed to such collectives we-attitudes and the goals and intentions ascribed to them we-intentions. I will make use of Margaret Gilbert's well-known plural subjects theory (Gilbert 2006(Gilbert , 2009 in spelling out these notions.Her account provides a useful framework for introducing the notion of a plural subject, and the related notion of the we-perspective, though in the next section I will argue that it is inadequate to characterize the plural subject that is the racing sailboat. 1 Much of what I say will apply to crewed cruising sailing, but my interest in this paper is in sailing in the context of competition. 2Central to Gilbert's account of plural subjects is the notion of a joint commitment. She asks us to consider two individuals deciding to take a walk together. In doing so each takes on a commitment to act in a certain way. More precisely, here is how the joint commitment is created:In the basic case… each of two or more people must openly express his personal readiness jointly with the others to commit them all in a certain way. Once the concordant expressions of all have occurred and are common knowledge between the parties, the joint commitment is in place. (2009, 180) Non-basic cases "involve authorities whose status derives from a basic joint commitment." (180) Joint commitments, Gilbert says, give rise to a normative structure of obligations and entitlements. If A and B are jointly committed to take a walk, then each is thereby obligated to act in an appropriate way and each is entitled to expect and demand of the other that they also act accordingly. Each owes the other the appropriate action. As Gilbert puts it, the joint commitment establishes the following conditions: … one's being owed that action by [the other] prior to his performing it, one's being in a position to demand it of him prior to its performance, and one's being in a position to rebuke him if he has failed to perform it at the appropriate ti...