Ascriptivism

Peter Geach obituary
Geach's own first book, Mental Acts (1957), now a classic in the philosophy of psychology, argued that "acquiring a concept is a process of becoming able to do something" – not, as many philosophers since Descartes had held, a matter of having internal representations of external things, or undergoing inner experiences. Geach criticised what he called abstractionism, the view that we acquire the concept of red, say, from repeated experiences of red. It would, he said, fail to account for many of our concepts. "Nowhere in the sensible world could you find anything, nor could you draw any picture, that could suitably be labelled 'or' or 'not'."
Mental Acts was much indebted to Wittgenstein. More original and in line with his distinctive technique of using hard logic to crack problems in metaphysics and ethics was his paper Ascriptivism (1960). Here he showed by means of "if" sentences the inadequacy of ethical theories which claim that to call a person, act or principle good or bad is just a matter of commending or expressing disapproval of the person, act or principle, without any possibility of referring to a real quality they have, or of being accurate about that quality. He made what he called "the Frege point", and later came to be called the Frege-Geach point, commenting that the word "wrong" in the sentence "If Bill did wrong, he will be punished," has the same meaning whether or not the person saying this believes that Bill did wrong.
"Good" and "bad" are anyway, Geach had argued in an article of 1956, nearly always attributive: adjectives integrally related to the terms they qualify. "X is good" is an incomplete assertion – the relevant criteria for saying Bill, or this horse, or this pen, is good depend on what sort of thing each is. It only makes sense to, say "X is a good F" (at least implicitly), and then the truth or falsity of saying so can be ascertained by finding out the function and nature of F. A pen, a horse, a man are good if they fulfil certain criteria. Bill might be a good engineer and a good thief, but a bad man. A man, however, unlike a horse, is not purely biological. We (properly) call him good not on behalf of our own preferences or purposes but of his own.
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