A long time ago Socrates sat in the Athenian market and talked with people about definitions. He was interested in how people thought about the world, and in challenging their ideas. He proposed, or his student Plato did, that we think about definitions as things that help us get to the essence of an issue. What is the essence of virtue? Or justice? Or the good? The problem is that this brough…t him in conflict with the dominant cultural paradigms (“definitions”) of his community. He died defending his right to question. The story of his life and death then became a special sort of paradigm for the Abrahamic religions: A glorious example of what it means to be a noble seeker of truth, a humble man endowed with superior insight into the nature of things, sacrificing everything for redemption in the clear light of faith, exemplifying the very essence of an authentic (i.e. “divine”) life. But do definitions really help us to get to the essence of a thing? Try this and see what you think: …define the word “love”….?
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metonymy4u 
Of the bat I’d say that definitions allow us to study a particular aspect of an object or concept. If you define love as the protectiveness that a parent feels for their child then you can start to engage the concept of love in a way that would be much harder to do in full generality. Perhaps it does not help us study the “essence” of something, but then it all depends how you define essence…
agreed!