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Peterdjones comments on Intuitions Aren't Shared That Way - Less Wrong
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Resolving the meaning of vague terms is a pointless activity/bad methodology. One should focus of seeking and answering better questions motivated by the same considerations that motivate the original vague questions instead. This involves asking "What motivates/causes the vague question?" rather than "What does the vague question mean?" as the first step, where the "vague question" is a real-world phenomenon occurring in a scholar's mind.
Sometimes, the cause of a question turns out to be uninteresting, a bug in perception of the world, which dissolves the question. Sometimes, the causes of a question turn out to have interesting and complicated structure and you need a whole lot of new ideas to characterize them. This way, "What is motion?" points towards ideas such as time, velocity, acceleration, inertia, mass, force, momentum, energy, impulse, torque, simultaneity, continuity, differential and integral calculus, etc., which were not there in the heads of the philosophers who first wondered about motion.
i wasn't aware that levels of vagueness are intrinsic and fixed. There is a sense in which "water" is now less vague (and a sense in which "matter" is now more vague).
ETA: It seems that when Science makes a term less vague, it does so by stipulation rather than resolution. When philosphers do that, it's a Bad Thing called the True Scotsman Fallacy.
In any case, I was only making the point that none of the quoted examples involved philsophers trying to deduce the nature of the external world from lingusitic behavuour.
Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change. "True Scotsman Fallacy" is about changing the question under discussion in an unhelpful manner, often in order to avoid the evaluation of the original question. If we agree that different questions have different degrees of usefulness (given some state of understanding), different ability to elicit further understanding, and are motivated by various purposes (as opposed to somehow being important in themselves), then serving the purpose of a question naturally employs developing different, more useful questions, and shifting the focus of investigation to them.