Suppose I stipulate that, henceforth, by \table" I mean \chair," and viceversa.

In
addition to being unnecessary, this would rightly be considered an invitation
to confusion.
There is a stronger case for stipulating a de_nition for social science concepts
such as power
or identity, where it is less initially clear what the ordinary language version
means. But
Typically, they move back and forth; see the discussion of \identity"'s history below.
\When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean { neither more nor less" (Carroll
1992, 124).
6
7
8

doing so still risks serious confusion to the extent that the stipulated
de_nition diverges from
the readers' unarticulated prior understanding. And there is no way to guage
this without
_rst explicating the meaning in current usage. In the end, social scientists
may often _nd it
necessary to re_ne and rede_ne ordinary language meanings. But without a
clear statement
of the prior meaning, even the stipulator will not know what she is doing with
the concept.9
Another argument for explicating current usage is that the method can yield
a deeper
understanding of contested and unclear concepts like \identity." The
intuitions behind ordinary
language meanings often have much interesting structure, which is likely to
be missed if
we jump to stipulating de_nitions. In their analyses of the concept of
\identity," both Gleason
(1983) and Brubaker and Cooper (1999) conclude that the wholesale, chaotic
spread of
\identity talk" in popular and academic language has deprived it of any
meaning at all.10
Quoting A.O. Lovejoy on the word \romantic", Gleason says that \identity" has
\come to
mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to
perform the function
of a verbal sign" (p. 914). Brubaker and Cooper believe that the term has
acquired so
many contradictory meanings and uses in sociology that it should be purged
in favor of more
speci_c terms. I will argue Brubaker and Cooper and Gleason are giving up
too