The notion of word sense that has been generally adopted in the literature is an artifact of several factors in the status quo, notably the availability of lexical resources such as machinereadable dictionaries, in which fine sense distinctions are not supported by criteria for selecting one sense rather than another, and WordNet, where synset groupings are taken as defining word sense distinctions.
for instance, Senseval-2 WSD tasks required disambiguation using WordNet senses (see, e.g., discussion in Palmer et al.