alt Hacker NewsI'd argue the presence of dictionaries proves the exact opposite. People realised there was an issue of talking past one another due to inexact definitions and then came to an agreement on those definitions, wrote them down and built a process of maintaining them.
In any case, even if there isnt a _single_ definition of a given subject, in order to have a discussion around a given area, both sides need to agree on some shared understanding to even begin to debate in good faith in the first place. It's precisely this lack of definition which causes a breakdown in conversation in a myriad of different areas. A recent obvious (morbid) example would be "genocide".
Alright, if you got that conclusion from existence of dictionaries, what do you get from this fact:
Wittgenstein, who's considered one of most brilliant philosophers of XX century, in _Philosophical Investigations_ (widely regarded as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy) does not provide definitions, but instead goes through a series of examples, remarks, etc. In preface he notes that this structure is deliberate and he could not write it differently. The topic of the book includes philosophy of language ("the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness,...").
His earlier book _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ was very definition-heavy. And, obviously, Wittgenstein was well aware of things like dictionaries, and, well, all philosophical works up to that point. He's not the guy who's just slacking.
Another thing to note is that attempts to build AI using definitions of words failed, and not for a lack of trying. (E.g. Cyc project is running since 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc). OTOH LLMs which derive word meaning from usage rather than definition seems to work quite well.