Names carry empirical historical traces that nominalist theory must confront

Evidence

These traces of naturalized or merely systemic notions of power, present also in Irene Diamond’s good interactive take on Foucault, are what I am calling the consequences of paleonymy. The word “power” points toward what we call the empirical in the history of the language. Poststructuralist nominalism cannot afford to ignore the empirical implications of a particular name. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1158

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘paleonymy’: the consequences of a name’s historical/empirical residue that remain even under ironic or nominalist use.
• XREF: This names exactly why strategic essentialism risks collapsing into residence-in essentialism — the word’s empirical history re-asserts itself. Bears on Spivak’s retrospective qualification in ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’. — connects to: Formal concepts retain traces of the historical phenomena that produced them — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 679; A mere resemblance of names drove medieval scholars to invent false historical connections

Broader Connections

• Formal concepts retain traces of the historical phenomena that produced them #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 679
• A mere resemblance of names drove medieval scholars to invent false historical connections #exemplifies (0.75)