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Ideas of Peter Geach, by Text

[British, 1916 - 2013, Married to Elizabeth Anscombe. University of Leeds.]

1956 Good and Evil
p.2 'Good' is an attributive adjective like 'large', not predicative like 'red' [Foot]
1957 Mental Acts: their content and their objects
§3 p.6 You can't define real mental states in terms of behaviour that never happens
§4 p.8 Beliefs aren't tied to particular behaviours
§5 p.13 If someone has aphasia but can still play chess, they clearly have concepts
§6 p.18 'Abstractionism' is acquiring a concept by picking out one experience amongst a group
§7 p.23 'Or' and 'not' are not to be found in the sensible world, or even in the world of inner experience
§8 p.28 We can't acquire number-concepts by extracting the number from the things being counted
§8 p.30 Abstractionists can't explain counting, because it must precede experience of objects
§8 p.31 The numbers don't exist in nature, so they cannot have been abstracted from there into our languages
§9 p.32 A big flea is a small animal, so 'big' and 'small' cannot be acquired by abstraction
§9 p.33 We cannot learn relations by abstraction, because their converse must be learned too
§10 p.35 Blind people can use colour words like 'red' perfectly intelligently
§10 p.36 If 'black' and 'cat' can be used in the absence of such objects, how can such usage be abstracted?
§10 p.37 We can form two different abstract concepts that apply to a single unified experience
§11 p.39 Attributes are functions, not objects; this distinguishes 'square of 2' from 'double of 2'
§11 p.40 The mind does not lift concepts from experience; it creates them, and then applies them
§16 p.69 Being 'the same' is meaningless, unless we specify 'the same X'
1980 Reference and Generality (3rd ed)
p.16 Leibniz's Law is incomplete, since it includes a non-relativized identity predicate [Wasserman]
p.17 Denial of absolute identity has drastic implications for logic, semantics and set theory [Wasserman]
p.93 Are 'word token' and 'word type' different sorts of countable objects, or two ways of counting? [Perry]
p.111 We should abandon absolute identity, confining it to within some category [Hawthorne]
p.39 p.90 Identity is relative. One must not say things are 'the same', but 'the same A as'
1983 Abstraction Reconsidered
p.163 p.163 For abstractionists, concepts are capacities to recognise recurrent features of the world
p.164 p.164 If concepts are just recognitional, then general judgements would be impossible
p.167 p.167 The abstractionist cannot explain 'some' and 'not'
p.168 p.168 Only a judgement can distinguish 'striking' from 'being struck'
p.170 p.170 Abstraction from objects won't reveal an operation's being performed 'so many times'