¹ Geach, P. T., ‘Good and Evil’, Analysis 17 (1956): 33–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All quotations in what follows are from pp. 33–34 of this article. For recent appearances of ‘attributive adjective’, see Foot, Philippa, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 2–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hursthouse, Rosalind, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 195–196Google Scholar; Read, Stephen, Thinking about Logic: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 176Google Scholar; and Thomson, Judith Jarvis, ‘The Right and the Good’, The Journal of Philosophy 6 (1997): 277Google Scholar.

² Frank Sibley claims that ‘we need, but are never given’ in Geach's article a ‘definition or elucidation’ of the terms ‘logically predicative’ and ‘logically attributive’ (‘Adjectives, Predicative and Attributive’, in Sibley, , Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, edited by Benson, John, Redfern, Betty, and Cox, Jeremy Roxbee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001, 156)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We take the quoted passage to be intended as just such a definition or elucidation. We also reject, for reasons that will become apparent in what follows, Sibley's view that the arguments that Geach provides for holding that certain adjectives are attributive imply several different ‘tests’ of attributivity, each yielding different results.

³ See Geach, , ‘Ascriptivism’ and ‘Assertion’, both reprinted in Geach, Logic Matters (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

⁴ The intended argument might also be: ‘a is a big flea; every flea is an animal; therefore, a is a big animal’. This requires a different schematic argument in step (2), but the overall course of reasoning is the same.

⁵ If one presumes at the outset that ‘x is a big flea’ can be represented by ‘Fx & Bx’, as does Donnelly, John (‘Some Remarks on Geach's Predicative and Attributive Adjectives’, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 12 (1971): 125–128)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, one is most likely to find Geach's distinction incoherent—as, again, does Donnelly. He is criticized on the point by Stevenson, John (‘Donnelly on Geach’, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 13 (1972): 429–430)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ One part of medieval logic was the analysis of ways in which a term may be ‘alienated’ from its customary ‘status’, ‘supposition’, or ‘appellation’. See, e.g., Buridan, John, Summulae de dialectica, translated by Klima, Gyula (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 301–302Google Scholar.

⁷ Sibley (158–159) excludes seeming occurrences of adjectives within idioms and technical terms as well as equivocal occurrences of adjectives from the scope of Geach's distinction, but does so in a merely ad-hoc fashion.

⁸ MacKay, Alfred F. (‘Attributive–Predicative’, Analysis 30 (1970): 118–119)Google Scholar and Pigden, Charles (‘Geach on “Good”’, The Philosophical Quarterly 49 (1990): 131–132)Google Scholar both read the quoted passage as an attempt (and an unsuccessful one) to establish the attributivity of ‘good’ by exhibiting a failure of inference along the lines indicated.

⁹ MacKay (115) interprets and criticizes the passage in just this fashion.

¹⁰ MacKay (117) imputes to Geach the view that bad food is not food. Aside from being implausible in itself, such an idea is at odds with the thesis that ‘bad’ is ‘something like’ an alienans adjective. If ‘x is bad food’ entailed ‘x is not food’, ‘bad’ would not be ‘something like’ an alienans adjective but would be one.

¹¹ Pigden takes Geach to be claiming that ‘we cannot infer that because food usually sustains life, bad food will sustain life’ (131; author's italics). Oddly, he takes this to show that ‘bad’ is attributive—though only in the phrase ‘bad food’, not in general.

¹² Sibley appears to recognize this element of Geach's conception when he notes that certain adjectives discussed by Geach are such that attempts to predicate them without an attendant substantive are ‘somehow incomplete … hence not fully intelligible, and hence can have no truth-value assigned to them’ (158). He claims, however, that this does not hold true of all attributive adjectives.

¹³ Austin's term ‘substantive-hungry’ (Austin, J. L., Sense and Sensibilia, edited by Warnock, G. J. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 68–70Google Scholar) is more colourful but less apt, as attributive adjectives remain dependent on substantives even when their appetite for them has been momentarily satiated. It may be noted that one of Austin's examples of a ‘substantive-hungry’ adjective is ‘good’.

¹⁴ Scott Soames may be thought to suggest a similar conception when he describes certain adjectives—‘big’ and ‘good’ among them—as ‘predicate modifiers’ (Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, volume 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 149–150). He even cites Geach's essay with approval in this connection. However, he offers no explanation of what a predicate modifier is; nor is it clear how to apply what he says about the workings of ‘big’ and ‘good’ to other attributive adjectives such as ‘putative’, ‘forged’, ‘real’, etc. An account much closer to our own, though advanced without reference to Geach, may be found in Quine's, W. V. brief remarks on what he terms ‘syncategorematic’ adjectives, in Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: M. I. T. Press, 1960), 103Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Contra Soames, who describes the schematic term ‘good N’ as a ‘compound predicate’ (151).