What Is an Attributive Adjective?

Abstract

Peter Geach's distinction between logically predicative and logically attributive adjectives has become part of the technical apparatus of philosophers, but no satisfactory explanation of what an attributive adjective is has yet been provided. Geach's discussion suggests two different ways of understanding the notion. According to one, an adjective is attributive just in case predications of it in combination with a noun fail to behave in inferences like a logical conjunction of predications. According to the other, an adjective is attributive just in case it cannot be applied in a truth-value-yielding fashion unless combined with a noun. The latter way of understanding the notion yields both a more defensible version of Geach's arguments that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are attributive and a more satisfactory explanation of attributivity.

A Stereoscopic Approach to Distinctions of Justice

“…However, when criticisms of its bourgeois, elitist, abstract and Eurocentric features multiplied and obtained academic visibility and currency, adherents to cosmopolitanism felt obliged to concede to opponents that there is, indeed, a hegemonic, humanist (qua anthropocentric) cosmopolitanism that is open to such criticisms. 24 To remain attached to cosmopolitanism and to maintain its normative function, its supporters had to keep distances from the tarnished conception of cosmopolitanism. They qualified their own cosmopolitanism by using adjectives such as "critical" or "new" and contrasted it to the "old cosmopolitanism".…”

“…with other facets of justice, is better qualified than social justice to cross the border that has been raised on reparative justice and has limited it either to transitional democracies or, within old democracies, to meeting refugee crises. It may make more visible and better accommodate those cases (e.g., Chagos, below) that cannot find justice within the political vocabulary of fashionable, normal academic discourses and of corresponding global public interventions [19][20][21][22][23][24].…”

“…article on cosmopolitanism. Despite our using a similar vocabulary concerning critical or new cosmopolitanism and the operation of holding cosmopolitanism in check through such adjectives, my approach departs from Hollinger's discussion in many ways 24. Certainly, this account of the emergence of new or critical cosmopolitanism (which should not be used interchangeably, as I used them here for reasons of brevity and focus) is so brief that it cannot be other than reductive, perhaps even sweeping.…”

­A defense of analogy inference as sui generis

“…Rather, the relevance tells us how x and y are similar: that they are relevantly similar and that they are so with respect to p. 29 Analogy is always a 28 Peter Geach [1956] made this distinction. One plausible suggestion for an exact criterion for the distinction is that an attributive adjective is an adjective that can form predicable terms solely in combination with nouns [Rind and Tillinghast 2008].…”

Natural Goodness, Sex, and the Perverted Faculty Argument

“… 6 For one of the few contemporary defenses of Geach on ‘good’ being a logically attributive adjective, see Miles Rind and Lauren Tillinghast (2008). Rind and Tillinghast engage the literature critical of Geach's view and argue that it is mistaken.…”