This Sentence Is Scientific

If you want this statement (that you may very well feel to be true or not) have any relevance outside of your own brain - if you want to convince people that this statement has something to do with reality - then you will have to find properties of the Red Sox that you can qualify and/or quantify and that live outside of your own brain (plus they should have some relation to "greatest single franchise", which you will have to define more clearly). As soon as you do that, you move into the realm of science.

In a way such a statement can be both. But as soon as it is your desire to convince other people that this statement is true you have to - more or less - start to think of it as a scientific statement.

That statement is demonstrably and objectively false. It is the Yankees that are the greatest franchise in sports history. But I am not surprised that some asshole Red Sox fan would spout a lie like that.

"The Red Sox are the greatest single franchise in any sport in history."

LOL. They aren't event the greatest single franchise in their division, even if you exclude Baltimore, Toronto and Tampa Bay...

Michael @#1:
...you will have to find properties of the Red Sox that you can qualify and/or quantify and that live outside of your own brain (plus they should have some relation to "greatest single franchise", which you will have to define more clearly).

Any such effort would invariably run aground on inherent fuzziness in the term "greatest." If I tried to define it, the instant response would be "but that's not what greatness really means!" You'll never pin a specific meaning on such a wobbly term.

Some terms are never going to be scientific, unless you truss them up well beyond their intuitive meanings.

But personally, I think Nike is the single greatest franchise in any sport in history, though Gatorade may be close behind. :P

I have a question for you: for some sentence S, is the sentence "Is this sentence scientific: S" scientific?

Since sports franchises exist to make money and win championships, these would be the obvious measures. I would measure on field success by comparing championship seasons v. probability of winning it in any given year summed over all years played. I would say it is a scientific statement, since there are ways in which it can be quantified. I would also say that the statement needs to be more specific as to what constitutes greatness (and what ever that is, the Red Sox don' have it).

As such, I propose another statement: Red Sox fans are the most deluded and obnoxious of any sports fan base in history.

If you define greatest as such and such you can answer this question in a scientific manner.

If other people accept your definition of greatest is a different question, but the fuzziness of this word (Great would be hard, but greatest is crazy. Superlatives are a dangerous thing.) is not so much a problem of science, it is more a problem of language. Words are things that are supposed to mean the same for everyone, if that weren't true in a very general sense language wouldn't work. But the problem with language is that in detail everyone will have slightly different definitions. In most cases this is not such a big deal, but when it comes to science those slight differences can become huge problems.

The problem here is not that the question if something is greatest anything could in principle never be answered, the problem here is the fuzziness of human language. The word greatest is not some mysterious thing that in principle is inaccessible, the problem is the amount of different definitions for what greatest means. That's what breaks this question. More a practical aspect, that any mysteriousness of the word greatest.

By reducing concepts like 'greatness' to a set of quantifiable measures, it would make the statement testable, but if only quantifiable qualifiers and controls are put in place, I doubt that you're left with the statement the speaker intended to make. I doubt that statement is meant as something that could be expressed entirely with statistics. I assume that the speaker's concept of 'greatness' when it comes to 'any sport in history' is meant to include unquantifiable but strong narrative elements which can still be conveyed as public knowledge; like a team's history, or spirit, shared stories about the kinds of people who coached for or played on the team, the way the team is interlinked with the city, its stories, its fans, its legends, etc etc. Then you're getting into the territory of how we convey legends, and the concept of legendary greatness cannot be expressed in scientific terms. It's narrative and symbolic, not quantifiable. And if the speaker grew up in Boston, from generations of Red Sox fans, and attended games with his or her friends and family, and experienced a community around the Sox, and saw in the travails and triumphs of the Sox metaphors that resonated in private life, then that person will have a wealth of inner, private experience that plays into the assertion about greatness, which is also nonquantifiable and cannot be expressed in scientific terms.

I don't see how one could claim, without highly controlled (and artificial, and frankly, ridiculous) qualifiers and definitions, that that statement is scientific.

*looks around, whispers*

Even though it's true. Go Sox!

Of course it would be ridiculous to test that statement.

It's just that there is really nothing mysterious about greatness. Even narrative elements are in principle not inaccessible, somewhere up there in a cloud. It would just be damn hard. It would maybe not practical to test such a statement, but not in principle impossible if all the problems are dealt with.

I'm not sure it's a problem that 'greatness' is indeterminate. In seriously engaging with something that is indeterminate like the concept of 'greatness' (or a symbol or an image), it means that people have to express their current ideas about what it is, and when someone else argues for a different definition, it allows everyone room to rethink their assumptions.

I don't think it's a break-down, so much as the potential for a break-through.

Several posters above state that if you can objectively quantify greatness, you can test the statement. (As Anna K. notes, that is probably not what the speaker intended.) The problem comes in at the "in any sport" part of the statement. It is possible to make valid comparisons of the Red Sox and the Yankees, for example. I would be much more dubious about comparing the Red Sox to Manchester United, because baseball and soccer are completely different sports, and it is difficult to have a one-to-one mapping between what makes a major league baseball team great and what makes a Premier League team great. For example, ties are common in soccer, but the rules of baseball are specifically designed to make ties impossible. Also, baseball has no equivalent to a yellow card (it is possible to be ejected from a baseball game, but unlike in soccer, the ejected player can be replaced).

I don't actually think "in any sport" is such a big problem: just start out comparing baseball to all other sports first and if it compares favourable you can go on just with baseball and more or less ignore the rest. (A problem here is that some team could do a crappy sport and still be the greatest franchise because of different reasons independent from the kind of sport they are doing.)

Though I am a die-hard Red Sox fan, by many metrics they are probably not even the greatest franchise in Boston. My nod would go to the Celtics over the Sox (so long as one looks far enough back anyway).

I don't pretend for a minute this is scientific though, even if we were to include some Billy Beane-esque analysis of the two.

As I tell the students in the writing course I TA, do not use "great" unless it is to express quantity. (something is greater than or lesser than) "Great" should not be used to to express quality.
Also the root for fantastic is fantasy, a synonym of incredible is unreliable, and terrible is derived from terror.
So while the statement is not terrible (it doesn't strike fear in my heart) it is both fantastic and incredible.

By attempting to quantify "greatest", you may or may not be measuring greatness in universal terms. You may be measuring income generated or number of fans or player stats. There is universal understanding that measuring a certain stat can be done quantitatively. However, whether than measure is a measure of greatness may be questionable.

Saying this is a scientific statement is on par with me saying, "This antenna is really good!" Well, good depends on what you mean. Do you mean it was high gain? If you want something that has good coverage in its pattern, you may not want something that has high gain. The term "good" is very situation specific because quantifiable measurements may mean different things to different people (and in this case, depends on the desired application for the antenna).

Therefore, no, the original statement is not scientific. A scientific statement is one that can be measured quantifiably and the definition of such can be agreed upon universally. You may think you can find ways to prove this statement, but all you are proving is that according to specific measures, this team is the greatest. By other measures, it may fall flat.

It sounds like a statement that could potentially be scientific if the terms were better defined.

The statement makes an ill-defined assertion, but a case could potentially be made in the rest of the scientific paper that defines the term.

I think it's instructive to insert the team X rather than Red Sox, so that we can talk about this subject with cooler heads.

"A scientific statement is one that can be measured quantifiably and the definition of such can be agreed upon universally. "

Please state for me the universally agreed-upon definition of "mammal" that all cladists agree upon.

What I'm saying is that there necessarily is some fuzziness to assertions when meeting the real world. There are some organisms which we can confidently place within mammalia, a good deal which we can confidently place outside of that... but a certain number of animals which defy easy placement.

Similarly, there may be some fuzziness about the definition of "greatness". But I think it can be made scientifically clear that some teams are closer to the fuzzy term and some teams are farther from that fuzzy term.

We might have different tastes in food, for example. But I think it can be scientifically proven that chocolate tastes better than feces. At some point, even accounting for variances in taste, we can still make authoritative statements regarding matters of taste.

If the Red Sox statement fails to be called "scientific" I don't think it fails on the universality prong as much as it fails on its absolutist prong. "SINGLE greatest EVER". But, of course, someone might be able to make the case. I cannot dismiss the claim without seeing the argument... perhaps there's a brilliant scientist who is able to do something nobody has ever done before.

Being of a scientific mind, one HAS to hear the argument and allow for the possibility that there's something nobody ever thought up before. To dismiss a claim as "unscientific" before looking at the data, is to take an unscientific action, is it not?

Red Sox? That's baseball. How can it be a great team if it doesn't play hockey? It's not even in the running.

The question is scientific. The confusion arises because it requires comparing two variables that are currently not compatible.

I think the question is distracting because it mentions a specific (and much loved/hated) sports team in a specific sport.

Take it in its generic form:

"Team A is the greatest team in its sport's history" is likely to be scientific. You can measure a given variable (greatness) as it applies to an object (Team A) over time (the history of the sport). "Team A is the greatest team in the history of any sport" is also scientific, in that we again have a quantifiable variable as it applies to an object. However, there do not currently exist equations to reconcile greatness variables across different sports.

This doesn't make the question unscientific, though. If not having a method for reconciling variables across different fields made a question unscientific (because it could not be answered using current equations), then the particle physicists and the cosmologists are gonna need to sit down together and do some talking.

What is the scientific standard for quantifying greatness in baseball?

"What is the scientific standard for quantifying greatness in baseball?"

I don't think there currently IS one. Which is why I'd have to read the rest of the paper to know if the authors had actually designed a rigorous standard that might hold up under future experiment.

Which is my point... you don't dismiss a statement as unscientific until you read the supporting data.

I don't think you can call it scientific unless you ARE able to quantify it in absolute terms.

Of course, my background is in physics and engineering, and everything is eventually defined in terms of a mathematical equation. We have different names for particular quantities which have changed over time (and it can be a major pain in the ass to realize you're talking about different things using the same terms). However, if you write down the equation, everyone will know what you're talking about.

In botany (which is the only life science that I have any experience in, so I realize it may be limited), you can use things like mass specs to measure quantities of various materials in a sample. Again, it's still quantifiable. My friend who's a biomed engineer creates mathematical models of heart failure to assess risk of mortality. More ways to quantify things.

"Greatness" is something you can't quantify. You can use all sorts of supporting facts and figures, but greatness itself is not a quality that can be measured. You can measure the number of fans or most income and claim that this implies a team is great, but greatness cannot be directly measured and the meaning is subject to the interpretation of the person using the word.

(Geez...I feel like I'm back in a philosophy class. It seemed like it was all semantics!) :-)

Hm. Wait. Social scientists would ask a big enough chunk of the world's population what's in their mind the greatest sports franchise in history and then you have it. Problem solved.

What the majority names is then not actually the greatest sports franchise in history (nor is this in any way an interesting question to ask). But you can use the statement as a sort of shorthand to describe the result of the survey. In that sense we are dealing here with a very real scientific statement. One that's relatively easy to test. (And like everything in social sciences it's gonna change over time. That's depressing.)

In a way I think that the only really completely unscientific statements are normative statements. (i.e. "The lecture hall should be painted yellow because that makes the students happy." Not scientific because while you can find out if yellow rooms make students happy, the decision if they should be happy is a political decision. Science can tell you nothing about that.)

Note that the phrasing only includes franchised organizations in the comparison...

Hm. That statement would have been categorically false in 1991, but now it might be worth arguing. :) But it's certainly within the realm of science to answer. Someone phone up Bill James!

Let me limit the data to teams of North America in games that are undeniably major. Arbitrary, but quantitative in each case.

New York Yankees, World Champion of Major League Baseball 26 times.

The Stanley Cup is the oldest professional sports trophy in North America. The Montreal Canadiens won it 24 times: 1915-16, 1923-24, 1929-30, 1930-31, 1943-44, 1945-46, 1952-53, 1955-56, 1956-57, 1957-58, 1958-59, 1959-60, 1964-65, 1965-66, 1967-68, 1968-69, 1970-71, 1972-73, 1975-76, 1976-77, 1977-78, 1978-79, 1985-86, 1992-93, and that makes a clear leader in Hockey.

Boston Celtics: Founded in 1946, their 16 NBA Championships are the most for any NBA franchise, while the 1959-to-1966 domination of the NBA Championship, with eight straight titles, is the longest consecutive championship winning streak of any North American professional sports team to date. Championships 16 (1957, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1969, 1974, 1976, 1981, 1984, 1986)
Conference titles: 19 (1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1969, 1974, 1976, 1981, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987)
Division titles: 26 (1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1991, 1992, 2005, 2008). That's pretty evidently the dominant franchise in pro Basketball history.

NFL Championship Game appearances 1933-1969:
14 New York Giants 3 11 .214
11 Cleveland Browns 4 7 .364
10 Green Bay Packers 8 2 .800
10 Chicago Bears 6 4 .600
6 Boston/Washington Redskins 2 4 .333
5 Detroit Lions 4 1 .800
5 Cleveland/Los Angeles Rams 2 3 .400
4 Baltimore Colts 3 1 .750
4 Philadelphia Eagles 3 1 .750
2 Chicago Cardinals 1 1 .500
2 Dallas Cowboys 0 2 .000
1 Minnesota Vikings 1 0 1.000
So if you go by who's in the final championship game most often (14), it's the New York Giants (current surprise champions when the Patriots seemed to be the team of destiny). If you go by championships won, it's the Green Bay Packers (8).

One could go by number of paid attendees total, or on the road, or dollar value or something like that, but I've listed 4 dominant franchises by the simple criterion of winning world championships of 4 sports long considered major in North America. In order of championships, it's:
#1: New York Yankees, 26
#2: Montreal Canadiens, 24
#3: Boston Celtics, 16
#4: Green Bay Packers, 8.

I suppose that one could normalize by number of years since the sport attained professionalism, or number of teams competing (integrated over temporal fluctuations), or length of time since last championship as some sort of greatest patient fans, or whatever, but one can be agnostic and still appreciate the numbers of the Yankees, Canadiens, Celtics, and Packers. Now, how do we play them off against each other?

And what happens when the World Cup of Baseball is entrenched in the late 21st century? And that Rocket Racing Franchise of the 22nd century? But that's another blog thread.

I suppose another important dimension worth considering here is the temporal. Since the statement mentions "history," we have to consider that definitions of greatness (just like definitions of any agreed upon, quantifiable, scientific term) is an historically specific artifact. So, whether we're talking about changes in the designated hitter rule or whether one assumes the presence of phlogiston in a substance being talked about/studied, the social context does matter.

[Would anyone want to venture a guess which of our current ideas about the world will be dramatically overhauled in the future -- to the tune of being called "ridiculous" someday? Robert Boyle was a great scientists, but we have to consider historical context when looking at his attitude toward the "scientificity" of phlogiston theory.]

Prof. Tim Poston adds by email from Bangalore:

It's scientific if it's falsifiable, which needs a definition of 'great'.

As for whether it's true... Manchester United has a franchise shop in the most expensive district of Singapore, which no colored-hosiery-name team has.

It is my vague impression that no North American franchise has remotely the global financial reach of the major soccer teams,
and today's exchange rates can only reinforce that.

Cases like this suggest that it might be worth distinguishing "scientific" and "empirical". Even if you could come up with a satisfactory operational definition of "greatness" (and whatever else), it doesn't seem like this would fit into a larger theory; and being a part of a larger theory seems to be an important part of something being "scientific". Many statements are empirical, and thus subject to being true or false by way of some kind of measurement, but aren't really scientific (except by a way-too liberal notion of scientific).

See: Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus".

Can statements even be scientific? I tend to think of science as a process/methodology.