[slibhb]

> People rarely prostitute themselves (or others) for tobacco though

I'm sure they would if tobacco was as hard to get as heroin.

We often find ourselves in this position where we have to choose between a broad and a narrow defintion (for addiction in this case). Maybe there is no right way to decide but I'd say we've been too often going with the broad definition. We tell ourselves "there aren't real dividing lines" and this becomes an excuse to expand definitions. One problem with this is that broad definitions are often less useful. In the worst case, expanding a definition results in meaningless (consider words like fascism and terrorism).

If addiction is "impulsive & compulsive behaviours, that people want to stop, but fail to" then anything can be addiction. Is that useful? I don't think so, I think it trivializes the concept and if that definition sticks, we'll have to come up with a new word. That's fine, I guess, but do we gain anything in that process?

[dalbasal]

There's a difference between meaningless an imprecise. Words like fascism, species, decency, beauty, and such do have meaning. They just don't have precise, F=ma like meaning.

There's also no problem defining and measuring addiction using discrete definitions such as withdrawal symptom severity, rehabilitation success rates or neurochemical signature. The problem arises when researchers (or anyone) then believes that this is the definition of addiction, when in reality it is a definition contrived for the purpose os (valid and useful) research. In a different context, it might be useful to think of these as indicators of... Usefulness is contextual.

Discrete language is fine. It just isn't the way we communicate normally, and it's impossible to use only discrete language to describe things we don't understand fully.

[slibhb]

Obviously natural language is never absolutely discrete. Let's say there's a spectrum between fairly discrete and fairly meaningless. I'm saying we should move toward the discrete side of things.

If we need to invent a new word to describe something, we can, we don't need to repurpose an old word and in doing so rob it of its meaning.