This practice risks equivocation, so it is important to make sure everyone is on the same page to the extent that sharp definitions are necessary in the conversation. However, as has been discussed in the sequence on words, the meaning of words is not given by explicit definitions; words are similarity clusters. So, for locally defined words, we refine the clusters enough for them to be useful in the context of our conversation.
You cite “A Human’s Guide to Words” here, but I think you miss what is an even more important lesson of that Sequence, which is that you can’t just arbitrarily redefine a word, and expect that thereby your interlocutors will at once abandon all the associations which that word has in their mind. They won’t. Even if they want to, they can’t.
You cite “A Human’s Guide to Words” here, but I think you miss what is an even more important lesson of that Sequence, which is that you can’t just arbitrarily redefine a word, and expect that thereby your interlocutors will at once abandon all the associations which that word has in their mind. They won’t. Even if they want to, they can’t.