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I started watching UFC and a silly question occurred to me - what can be considered a sport, and is there a way to objectively classify something as a sport?

In my view, sport consists of two parts: (1) pursuing a goal that is treated as important as the outcome of an activity, and (2) the skills and physical abilities required to achieve it most effectively within certain boundaries and/or restrictions.

On this view, a sport can be described as a combination of a defined goal and constraints that matter to a group of people. If the goal of a sport can vary arbitrarily depending on what a community values, then the goal seems like a poor basis for an objective measure of "sportness". That leaves the constraints (rules, limits, permitted means) as a more measurable candidate for quantifying sport.

If we focus on constraints, we might try to list physically possible constraints relevant to human beings and rank them by their significance for embodied existence. On that scale, I doubt there is any constraint more significant than the stable functioning of the human body itself.

Returning to goals, even if we can’t measure "sportness" by the goal directly, we can note that goals can be pursued more actively or more passively — through action or endurance. Given the importance of the body and this action/endurance distinction, it seems to me that martial arts might count as "maximally sporty", because they require both active skill (inflicting damage using one’s body (and knowledge)) and endurance under the sport’s constraints (withstanding damage inflicted by the opponent directly to your body).

Am I right to reduce "sportness" mainly to the structure and severity of constraints? Or is there a better way to think about what makes something a sport?

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  • Comments have been moved to chat; please do not continue the discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an answer, on Philosophy Meta, or in Philosophy Chat. Comments continuing discussion may be removed. Commented Jan 14 at 18:57
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    I'll ask what may be a very dumb question: what is UFC? Commented Jan 14 at 19:33
  • ufc = Ultimate Fighting Championship, a mixed martial art competition - like a type of kick-boxing. Commented Jan 15 at 20:38

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Whether an activity is considered a sport is a matter of context and usage, not definition. Sport is a fuzzy concept. As with other concepts, it has evolved organically not systematically. You can try to list characteristics of activities that are accepted as sports, but you won't find a sufficiently broad set that applies to every sport. Consider the following examples...

  • Shooting is considered a sport, but it's considered a job when it's performed by pest control professionals. On the other hand, the job of a professional golfer is considered a sport.

  • Many sports involve an element of competition with other players, but others don't.

  • Some sports are codified, have governing bodies, leagues etc, but
    many don't.

  • Some sports involve physical skills or prowess, but chess is a mental game.

Your definition of sport as combining goals with physical skills would apply equally well to scaffolding, bricklaying, surgery etc etc etc.

Your question about degrees of 'sportness' is misconceived. Sport is a category, not an adjective. It's like asking whether there are different degrees of food, or religion, or TV programmes.

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    Or the proto-typical example of trying to come up with a definition of a chair. Commented Jan 14 at 16:22
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I just remembered one funny thing... Ludwig Wittgenstein used "games" as his primary example of Family Resemblance. He argued there is no single thread that runs through all sports (tennis, chess, football, UFC).

Some have balls, some don't. Some are team-based, some aren't. Some are physical, some are strategic.

However, modern sport philosophy often uses a Cluster Concept to quantify "sportness." We can rank activities based on how many of the following "institutional" traits they possess.

Physicality -- Does it require motor skills? (Separates Football from Chess). Competition -- Is it zero-sum? (Separates Tennis from Hiking). Institutionalization -- Are there codified rules and governing bodies? (Separates UFC from a bar fight). Or what elsee... Broad Interaction -- Does your performance affect the opponent?

So.. Is UFC "Maximally Sporty"?

Under your view, UFC is the peak because it attacks the body. Under the Cluster Concept, UFC is indeed highly "sporty," but not because of the danger. It is sporty because it maximizes Interference.

Independent Sports (Gymnastics, Golf).. My score depends only on me. I cannot physically stop you from doing well. Interference Sports (UFC, Football).. Here to achieve my goal, I must physically prevent you from achieving yours.

UFC is not "more of a sport" than Golf, but it is a "more interactive" sport.

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  • There's also the concept of "mind sports" -- this encompasses many card and board games, and was popularized during attempts to get games like chess and bridge into the Olympics. But some also consider this an oxymoron, which is probably what doomed that effort. Commented Jan 14 at 16:14
  • @Barmar ino whether we consider something a sport isn't defined by some bureaucrats in OLympics board Commented Jan 14 at 17:34
  • Perhaps, although in this case they may be reacting to presumed public sentiment. If enough people think it's silly it could tarnish the reputation of the Olympic games. We've seen similar ridicule of "e-sports", people playing video games professionally. Commented Jan 14 at 18:13
  • @Barmar in South Korea it's a very serious sport, coaches, training camps, serious money, all the things that sport has. No ridicule Commented Jan 14 at 18:28
  • Cultures differ. In the US, new stories about e-sports competitions tend to treat them lightly or with surprise. People still find it surprising that people (often teenage boys) can make a living as e-sports competitors. Of course, it wasn't too long ago that there were similar attitudes about social media influencers, now it's a recognized, serious profession (although we boomers may still think it's silly). Commented Jan 14 at 18:31
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In my personal interpretation of the word Sport is this: A game or event bounded by rules that focuses on physical or mental work to improve at said game or event for competitive or personal purposes. For example, Chess is a sport recognized by the International Olympic Committee as it helps with mental stamina, physical stamina, as games can be extremely lengthy in major events, critical thinking, and decision making skills. Traditionally, sports are physical in nature, but there are some, like Chess, recognized by the IOC that are rather mental. As for "sportness", I think you just need to follow the definition of sport as a guide. Anything can be a sport if the mind is put to it.

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  • I see your point, and I agree that sports can emphasize either mental or physical abilities. My focus is slightly different. I’m interested in how the goal is achieved and whether we can compare sports by the balance between active performance and passive demands placed on the body. Chess clearly requires active skill (thinking, attention, decision-making), which is part of our embodied capacities. But it seems much less demanding on the "passive" side - there is endurance and fatigue, but the bodily burden is relatively mild compared to many physical sports. Commented Jan 13 at 21:28
  • Do you think this active vs. passive bodily demand could be a reasonable way to measure "sportness", or is that just measuring a different property (like physical intensity) rather than "sportness" itself? Commented Jan 13 at 21:29
  • Absolutely. We can categorize them into 3 categories: Physical Sport, Mental Sport, and... well, Not a Sport. But numerically? That'll be subjective and opinionated. It really depends on one's perspective Commented Jan 14 at 19:38
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A 'sport' is a kind of game — i.e., a rule-bound competition — which primarily involves physical skills (endurance, strength, coordination, acuity, environment-contextual knowledge, etc). Fishing and billiards are as much 'sports' as competitive martial arts; they aren't more or less 'sporty', they merely require different skills and knowledge.

We wouldn't say that chess or go is more of a 'game' than checkers or tic-tac-toe. They are all games, with different skills and strategies involved. So why would we say that one sport is more of a 'sport' than other sports? These are classifications, not evaluations. We might say that one sport is harder or more demanding, but that is a different kind of statement.

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  • I get your point, but I don’t think "sport" and "game" are interchangeable. A sport can be seen as a kind of game, but not every game is a sport, and we use different words because we’re tracking features - especially physical skill and body performance. Also, the common use of adjectives like "sporty/athletic" suggests there is a notion of something being "more sporty" at least in the sense of using bodily capacities more centrally. That doesn’t mean one sport is "better" than another, but it might still allow a comparative dimension that we wouldn’t normally apply to "game" in the same way. Commented Jan 13 at 20:14
  • @Fraim: I should have said that a sport is a kind of game: a subset. Fixed. As far as the adjective 'sporty'… That's a different sense of the word meaning 'flashy' or 'showy'. It's like comparing the noun 'game' to the adjective 'gamy'. One can be quite 'sporty' without being involved in sports at all, just by a good selection of clothing accessories. Commented Jan 13 at 20:29
  • True, "sporty" can mean "athleisure/fashion" and have nothing to do with actually playing sports. I’m using it in the other (a subset) sense - the extent to which an activity involves skill and bodily capacities in pursuit of a goal under rules/constraints. Even if the goals differ across sports, the constraints and means of success are ultimately shaped by the physical world and human embodiment, so they seem at least in principle comparable. In that limited sense, "sportness" could be quantified as the degree of physical involvement required to achieve the goal within the constraints. Commented Jan 13 at 20:56
  • @Fraim: Well, you could do that, I suppose, but it seems arbitrary to me. Billiards, hunting, swimming, gymnastics, soccer: proficiency at one of these doesn't suggest automatic proficiency at any of the others. They share nothing except the fact that they are 'physical'. But then dealing cards and moving chess pieces are also physical, embodied activities, so does that make them sports? And what about dancing, which is considered an art, not a sport? I'm not certain that your thoughts here add to or subtract from knowledge… Commented Jan 13 at 21:21
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    @MichaelHall: Hmmm… You may underestimate the connection between philosophy and beer. Commented Jan 13 at 23:49
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Sport is a socially recognized practice in which participants pursue a goal that the practice treats as important as the activity’s outcome, and in which success depends on how effectively a person deploys their embodied capacities — including mental ones — within determinate boundaries and/or restrictions accepted by the practice (rules, frameworks, conditions) that fix what counts as achieving the goal and what counts as "effective" achievement.

Sportness (degree of “sportness”) can be ranked by which constraints do the decisive work: the more they engage constraints fundamental to embodied human existence (e.g., bodily stability, fatigue/endurance, coordination, sustained attention, tolerance of pain/risk), the higher the sportness.

I offer the following as a working definition of "sport" purely for clarity and ease of discussion. It is not intended as a final or exhaustive analysis, but as a convenient way to make my assumptions explicit and keep the argument focused.

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  • "I offer the following as a working definition..." -- there's no following definition. Did you mean "preceding" (or maybe you changed the paragraph order during editing)? Commented Jan 14 at 16:18
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I doubt there’s a clear answer to this. Even by the standards you’ve articulated, it’s unclear how one could decisively argue that combat sports are more “sporty” than rugby or field hockey or a bunch of other sports that involve physical capabilities (speed, strength, endurance), skill (kicking, skill with the hockey stick, etc.), knowledge (reading the defense, being in the right place x seconds from now as a play develops, memorizing a playbook, etc.)

I once read an article which argued that long-distance running is the only non-absurd sport because it’s pretty much the only physical endeavor we’re actually good at compared to other animals (human runners even sometimes win the highly entertaining “man vs. horse” 21-mile cross-country race that’s held every year in Llanwrtyd Wales). Why are we so fascinated with things we suck at (compared to other animals)? Shouldn’t the most “sporty” sport be the one we’re actually good at?

Beyond that, why focus on just physical skills? In the former Soviet sports development system, chess was considered a sport. And once you’ve classified chess as a sport, why not something like the Math Olympiad?

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  • Sports are usually competitions between humans, how we compare with other animals is not really interesting. And overcoming human design limitations is also seen as an achievement. Why would we have a competition for something everyone does routinely? Commented Jan 14 at 16:16
  • I challenge your premise, or at least the premise of the article saying that the only "physical endeavor" humans excel at is long-distance running. Humans far outstrip any animals in the physical endeavor of accurately throwing/kicking objects. No other animal can throw or kick a projectile and hit a distant target with any force. That's a main component of many activities that are considered nearly canonical sports, that many people are definitely "fascinated" with. Commented Jan 14 at 19:09
  • @qdread : Yeah, throwing or striking a projectile with accuracy is a good counter-example to the long-distance running argument. Commented Jan 14 at 22:30
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"Sport" is just a classification. And like almost all classifications, entirely arbitrary. It's a word people made up to describe a set of things people do. So, what is considered a sport or a property of sports is nebulous. There is no objectively determined definition of what a sport is. Different people have different definitions, different properties they associate with sports, different ways they recognize something as a sport. None of them can be said to be objectively correct or incorrect.

However, the usefulness of such a classification and word is its ability to communicate meaning to other people. If my idea of "sport" is too different from your definition of "sport", then I might invite you over to watch "sports" and you might be confused and angry when you show up expecting UFC or football and instead find that we're watching some guy make buttons.

So, one thing to consider with classification is how many people agree on definition; it's inter-subjective overlap. You could poll everyone and ask "do you consider this a sport" for every thing. And then you could draw some arbitrary line and say "it's a sport if 80% of people would call it a sport". But that too is an arbitrary and subjectively decided definition and determination.

For some definitions, the definition might be specific enough that while the choice of definition is still arbitrary, but at least given the definition it can be objectively determined whether something meets that definition. However, these things are kind of rare in every day life. You'll usually only encounter them in mathematics or physics where the definitions can be made in terms of explicit reduction to deductive principles or exact properties of matter.

So, no. Your definition and determination of what is or isn't a sport is no more correct or objective than anyone else's. Even if you came up with a definition that was so rigorously defined that anyone could objectively determine what is a sport or isn't based on your definition; the choice to use your definition over some one else's is not an objective choice.

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