 Sometimes a definition is offered neither descriptively nor stipulatively but as, what Rudolf Carnap (1956, §2) called, an explication. An explication aims to respect some central uses of a term but is stipulative on others. The explication may be offered as an absolute improvement of an existing, imperfect concept. Or, it may be offered as a “good thing to mean” by the term in a specific context for a particular purpose. (The quoted phrase is due to Alan Ross Anderson; see Belnap 1993, 117.)