A lot of people, not just Robinson, find an imprecise thought uncomfortable: to these types, it looks like a leak to plug rather than an opportunity to let thoughts flow. Some of those leak-pluggers end up clogging up the works professionally, by becoming analytic philosophers. The analytic philosopher (there are other types of philosophers—or, as I usually think of them, other lunch-table cliques in philosophy) thinks of himself as clear, objective, and precise, and loves to start sentences with phrases like It is obvious . . . or It is clear that. . .
The irony being that last is shit writing.
