Why symbolising arguments cannot offer rigour to the philosophy of sport: A worked example

For some long time, and at least since a paper I presented in 1995 (see Chapter 3), I have urged that any philosophy of sport worthy of the name must take seriously standards of rigour from across philosophy, and that it has regularly failed to do so. In this light, one might expect me to endorse the direction adopted by Otto and Otto (2013) in the appendix to their paper in the journal Sport, Ethics and Philosophy. For they there deploy the resources of symbolic logic to offer ‘a demonstration’ that their argument in the paper is formally valid. This might seem like exactly the importation of philosophical rigour for which I was asking.