Rejecting a term for its past content can block absorbing a useful instrumental value

Evidence

Thus we have seen the term “materialism” accepted with its past content, while the term “immanence” was rejected because in the past it had a particular historical cultural content. The difficulty of fitting literary expression to conceptual content and the confusion of questions of terminology with questions of substance and vice versa is typical of philosophical dilettantism and of the lack of an historical sense in grasping the different moments of a process of cultural development, typical, in other words, of an anti-dialectical and dogmatic conception, imprisoned within the abstract schemas of formal logic. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1611

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretizes the instrumental-value principle with the materialism/immanence example and defines the error as confusion of terminology with substance.
• XREF: The language-content mechanism — new situations change the content of inherited language — prefigures later theorizations of how colonial/modern vocabularies (e.g. ‘civilization’, ‘materialism’) are repurposed, which the Islamophobia toolkit will need. — connects to: Rejecting final meaning need not mean rejecting meaning altogether. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 724

Broader Connections

• Rejecting final meaning need not mean rejecting meaning altogether. #expands (0.78) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 724