It matters how we define words, not merely that we define them. Yet, as we have seen in the previous chapter, the task of concept formation is irreducibly complex, involving claims for coherence, operationalization, validity, field utility, resonance, contextual range, parsimony, and analytic/empirical utility (see Table 3.1). Not surprisingly, natural scientists like E. O. Wilson find the lexicon of social science to be confusing and unstable terrain, an apparently orderless field of churning terms, definitions, and referents. Three problems, in particular, plague the social science lexicon: homonymy (multiple meanings for the same term), synonymy (different terms with the same, or overlapping, meanings), and instability (unpredictable changes in the foregoing). As a result, studies of the same subject appear to be talking about different things, and studies of different subjects appear to be talking about the same thing.