Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles D. Broad

Broad’s provocation lands like a cold splash on the 20th century’s growing faith in laboratory-style certainty. By declaring experiments “utterly useless” for philosophy, he isn’t dunking on science; he’s drawing a border fence around what philosophy is allowed to be. The line is blunt because the temptation is persistent: if physics wins prestige through testable predictions, why shouldn’t philosophy audition for the same cultural authority?

Broad’s intent is methodological triage. Experiments work when you can isolate variables, quantify outcomes, and agree on what would count as disconfirmation. Philosophy, in his view, mostly traffics in the preconditions of that whole enterprise: what counts as evidence, what a cause is, what a person is, what “knowing” means. You can’t run an experiment to decide whether causation is a necessary connection or a pattern we project; the experiment already assumes a concept of cause. That’s the subtext: philosophy is not a rival lab but the place where the lab’s conceptual equipment gets inspected.

There’s also a quiet jab at scientism, the idea that the scientific method is the universal solvent for every question worth asking. Broad, writing in a period shaped by logical analysis and the prestige of empiricism, insists that some problems are resistant by design: they are about meanings, categories, and logical relations. His rhetoric works because it refuses compromise. By calling experiments “useless,” he forces the reader to confront a harder point: philosophy’s value isn’t in mimicking science, but in clarifying what science cannot, on its own, justify.