What is Sport (Philosophically Speaking)?

Background: According to the members of the consulting committee for correcting and updating the term ʻsportʼ, there are six criteria we should adopt in order to define what a sports activity is (Lidor et al., 2001). These criteria are consistent with those accepted in many countries worldwide, serving sports governing bodies in defining what a sports activity is. The consulting committee believes that in order to define a physical activity as sport, all the proposed criteria should be adopted. The members of the committee hope that these criteria will assist sports governing bodies in Israel in trying to discern between sports activities and other activities.

Aims: Our aim is to discuss the various criteria offered by the consulting committee and propose a more comprehensive answer to the question “What is sport?”.

Methods: Since we accept analytic philosophy, our considerations proceed by examining ways of speaking about the phenomenon in question. However, we note in advance that we understand linguistic analysis as being object-oriented.

Results: We begin with some observations based on common or ordinary opinions about sport. Then, we try to explain in which sense the question “What is sport?” can be considered to be philosophical. The next step consists of citing several popular definitions of sport derived from vocabularies and encyclopedias, which are also philosophical. This leads to a general problem of what it means to define something. We report various descriptions of the concept of definition and its species. The next section applies these settings to the concept of sport, but we do not limit our remarks only to formulations that seem to be definitions.

Discussion: We consider characterizations of sport: as physical activity; expertise aimed at a clear goal; competitiveness; known and agreed laws of the game; institutionalization; and, clear rules of victory, loss, or tie. In general, our view is that an essentialist definition of sport is impossible. However, we consider professionalism as an important feature of contemporary sport. Although sport is not definable by traditional means, we think that there are some paradigmatic cases of sport. This view naturally suggests that Wittgensteinʼs later philosophy of language and related views can be applied to the analysis of sport.

Conclusion: Considering the problem of using a classical or even a quasi-definition to capture the meaning of sport, we would like to suggest a Wittgensteinian approach as an alternative model, namely of utilizing Wittgenstein’s remarks on the concept of game as a paradigm. Wittgenstein`s solution is novel and opens up a new way of understanding the meaning of sport.

Lidor, R., Galily, Y., Fejgin, N., Lebed, F., Netz, Y., Wertheim, M., & Harlap, U. (2011). What is sport? Six recommended criterions for the definition of sports activity. Movement, 10, 59-69 [in Hebrew].