- A key distinction in Geach’s “Good and Evil” is that between predicative and attributive adjectives. Briefly explain this distinction and include your own example(s) in your answer.
Geach calls predicative a phrase of form ‘S is an X-y Z’ one can logically split into ‘S is X-y’ and ‘S is Z.’
The predicative/attributive distinction, effectively, is between, respectively, two relatively independent characterizations of a thing, and a single characterization of a thing with a qualifier thereto.
Taking as an example the phrase ‘Geach is a difficult writer:’ in it, ‘difficult’ applies specifically to the word ‘writer;’ separated, the phrases would be ‘Geach is difficult,’ and ‘Geach is a writer,’ with the former clearly not meaning the same thing it meant in the original sentence, reflecting on his character rather than his writing. As such, in this phrase, ‘difficult’ is an attributive adjective.
A phrase like ‘Geach is a British writer,’ on the other hand, does split cleanly into ‘Geach is British,’ and ‘Geach is a writer,’ thus rendering ‘British’ an predicative adjective.
- Geach (1956:36) writes: “[I]f I call a man a good burglar or a good cut-throat I am certainly not commending him myself”. Which account of the word “good” is he criticizing here and what is the point of his example?
Herein Geach criticizes the view of a group he calls the ‘Oxford Moralists,’ to whom he attributes the view that the ‘good’-ness is a commendatory description. That is to say, in their view, ‘goodness’ is effectively reduced to a selection criterion, a way of choosing between different options.
Examples such as that of ‘a good book’ being ‘a book I recommend’ seem plausible to Geach; his retort quoted above, however, intends to show that in other cases, such as that of a ‘good burglar,’ the exception - wherein one would need to select between different burglars for a special job - cannot be the rule: what Geach is trying to show is that we often call things ‘good’ without it being a commendation.