The Word Science

Clear thought can exist without a person using language clearly and consistently, a person who uses language inconsistently or haphazardly without care can contribute to fairly significant cultural confusion about certain issues.  Take the word "science."  People use this word frequently in ways that are not identical without ever directly clarifying what exactly they mean and do not mean, something that means they might not understand the basic concept of scientific epistemology.  For example, they might say "science is how nature operates" and say "science can be manipulated with money" and never think about how, unless they mean something different in each case, they would be saying that the laws of nature can be manipulated with money.

Sometimes people might use the word "science" when the context indicates they are referring to scientists, the epistemological scientific method, the actual laws of nature, popular ideas about science, and scientific paradigms of the past.  The issue is that not only are these things not the same, but they are also very different.  For example, unless the behaviors of nature changes--a logical possibility that just happens to seem unlikely--scientific laws themselves do not change, only popular ideas about science advanced by people.  Thus, referring to both scientific laws and scientific paradigms as "science" is misleading at best and outright asinine at worst.  There is no reason to not be more specific in words, but perhaps most people who use this word in these multiple contexts are simply too shallow to seriously think about the basic distinctions here.

The typical person does the same with words like "reason," referring to anything from the actual laws of logic (which dictate what follows from things no matter who realizes or acknowledges it) to an individual's ability to grasp reason to a subjective sense of comprehension.  Some even think reason and science are interchangeable words because they have not realized the difference between sensory investigation and the abstract laws of logic!  Again, none of these are the same.  Confusing these concepts is even more disastrous because logic is what literally underpins everything epistemologically and metaphysically; people cannot understand knowable truths or how to prove them to themselves apart from understanding distinctions like these on some level.

One easy way to stop both personal and public confusion is to just use words in a consistent manner.  This is already more than some are willing to do, or else there would be no major linguistic inconsistencies in any culture.  With words like "science," conceptual confusion, epistemological confusion, and confusion about their own intentions behind the word can lead to massively different ideas that get articulated using the same statements.  There are simply few people who are consistently self-aware, rational, or concerned with truth, and thus the ambiguities of using language to communicate are unnecessarily amplified when they could be easily minimized.

Language is used most inconsistently by people who are apathetic to rationalism or who specifically enjoy fitting into society as it is.  This is why words like "philosophy," "truth," "proof," and "knowledge" also get used inconsistently.  Reason and science are not the only conceptual casualties of random usage of the same words to mean wildly different things, some of them incoherent and therefore conveying impossible ideas!  The example of the word science is just one of many that could be given of linguistic stupidity.  With something so culturally vague in itself, people must speak as consistently as they can if they wish to avoid the pointless difficulties of even greater linguistic ambiguity than words already have by nature.  Consistent terminology avoids a great deal of communication issues by default.