Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles D. Broad

Broad is swatting away a stubborn caricature of philosophy: the idea that “clarifying concepts” is just glorified thesaurus work, a fussy trade in longer definitions that smother ordinary words under a duvet of clauses. The bite in his sentence is aimed at a certain scholastic temptation, one still familiar in academic prose: if you can’t make a thought sharper, make it longer. Broad’s point is that conceptual clarity isn’t achieved by swapping “cause” for “that which regularly precedes an event under conditions C” and calling it progress.

What he’s defending is a distinctively analytic ambition, shaped by early 20th-century debates in Britain: philosophy as diagnosis rather than doctrine. Clearing up meanings isn’t about re-labeling; it’s about exposing the working parts of a concept - the criteria for its use, the boundaries where it breaks, the assumptions it smuggles in. A long phrase can even be a decoy: it feels explanatory because it’s elaborate, not because it guides judgment.

The subtext is methodological and slightly impatient: if philosophy is reduced to paraphrase, it becomes either pedantry (mere verbal tidying) or pseudo-science (definitions pretending to be discoveries). Broad insists that the real work happens when clarification changes what questions seem legitimate, what counts as evidence, and where a dispute is actually located. Sometimes the cure is to show that two sides are using the same word for different jobs; sometimes it’s to reveal that the word has no stable job at all.

In that light, “clear up” means untangle, not inflate. Philosophy earns its keep by making our conceptual tools usable, not ornate.