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The normativity of content and ‘the Frege point’Jeff SpeaksMarch 26, 2008In “Assertion,” Peter Geach wrote:“A thought may have just the same content whether you assent to itstruth or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, nowunasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition. ...I shall callthis point about assertion the Frege point...The magnitude and variety of philosophical errors that result from notseeing the Frege point justifies a missionary zeal in the matter.” 1Sometimes, Geach puts the point in terms of the distinction between predication andassertion: one can predicate an expression of something without asserting that itis true of that thing. 2 The reason why this is possible is that facts about what ispredicated of what are facts about the meaning of the sentence in question; assertion,on the other hand, is one speech act among many which one can perform with asentence. More generally, the Frege point is that there is a distinction between themeaning of a sentence and the speech acts that a sentence can be used to perform;one cannot infer that properties of the latter are properties of the former.Geach put the Frege point to use in arguing against, among other views, perfor-mative analyses of ethical sentences. The sort of performative analysis with whichGeach was concerned gave the meaning of a predicate like ‘is good’ by saying that thispredicate is used not to describe some object or event as having a certain property,but to perform the act of commending the object or event. Geach argued that suchviews run afoul of the Frege point by ignoring the fact that “the same term mightoccur without any change of sense in an unasserted occurrence of the proposition.” 3In such unasserted uses, Geach claimed, the speaker is not commending the object ofwhich ‘good’ is predicated, even though ‘good’ is being used with its usual meaning.The performative analysis, Geach thinks, is therefore guilty of inadvertently changingthe subject. It was supposed to be a view about the meanings of ethical terms; but itis really a theory about some speech acts assertoric uses of those terms can be usedto carry out. One moves from the latter to the former only by ignoring the Fregepoint: the distinction between the meaning of a sentence and what assertoric uses ofthe sentence typically do — or, more generally, between meaning and speech act.Whatever one thinks of Geach’s argument against the performative analysis andits descendants, the Frege point is surely correct and important: the meaning of a1 Geach (1965), 449, 464.2 See especially Geach (1960).3 Geach (1965), 461.1