Rationalist Taboo is a technique for fighting muddles in discussions. By prohibiting the use of a certain word and all the words synonymous to it, people are forced to elucidate the specific contextual meaning they want to express, thus removing ambiguity otherwise present in a single word.
Mainstream philosophy has a parallel procedure called "unpacking". Unpacking has the requirement that the contentious or doubtful term be expanded out--not just replaced with a synonym--and only used as a collection of subcomponent concepts.