Quasi-Realism

Quasi-realism is the meta-ethical view claiming that Ethical sentences do not express propositions. Ethical sentences project emotional attitudes as though they were real properties.

Quasi-realism a form of non-cognitivism or expressivism.

Quasi-realism stands in opposition to other forms of non-cognitivism such as emotivism and universal prescriptivism, as well as to all forms of cognitivism, including both moral realism and ethical subjectivism.

Aesthetic judgements are autonomous, as many other judgements are not: for the latter, but not the former, it is sometimes justifiable to change one's mind simply because several others share a different opinion. Why is this? One answer is that claims about beauty are not assertions at all, but expressions of aesthetic response. However, to cover more than just some of the explananda, this expressivism needs combining with some analogue of cognitive command, i.e. the idea that disagreements over beuaty can occur, and when they do it is a priori that one side has infringed the norms governing aesthetic discourse. This combination can be achieved by reading Kant's aesthetic theory in expressivist terms. The resulting view is a form of quasi-realism about beauty. This conclusion generalises to quasi-realism about other matters. - Kant, Quasi-Realism, and the Autonomy of Aesthetic Judgement - Hopkins, Robert, European Journal of Philosophy, Vol 9, Num 2, August 2001

QUASI-REALISM, ACQUAINTANCE, AND THE NORMATIVE CLAIMS OF AESTHETIC JUDGEMENT - Cain Samuel Todd
Cain Todd, Centre for Philosophy, IEPPP, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YG, UK.
My primary aim in this paper is to outline a quasi-realist theory of aesthetic judgement. Robert Hopkins has recently argued against the plausibility of this project because he claims that quasi-realism cannot explain a central component of any expressivist understanding of aesthetic judgements, namely their supposed ‘autonomy’. I argue against Hopkins’s claims by contending that Roger Scruton’s aesthetic attitude theory, centred on his account of the imagination, provides us with the means to develop a plausible quasi-realist account of aesthetic judgement. Finally, I respond to two recent attempts to discredit the validity of the notion of aesthetic autonomy. I claim that both fail adequately to address the underlying non-realist motivations and justifications for maintaining the principle.

Pragmatism, Quasi-realism and the Global Challenge
usyd.edu.au/time/price/preprints/pragmatism-abstract.htm
Expressivism is typically a local view. An expressivist about moral or aesthetic judgments will contrast these judgments to "genuinely" descriptive claims (such as those of science, perhaps). This contrast comes under pressure from several directions, however.
• Externally, it has been thought to be threatened by minimalism about truth, which—it is argued—leaves no room for the view that moral claims (say) are not really truth-evaluable. (If truth is "thin", then it seems easy for moral claims be truth-evaluable—it is sufficient that "X is good" is true iff X is good, and who disputes that?)
• Internally, it seems threatened by the quasi-realist program of explaining on expressivist foundations why non-descriptive claims "behave like" descriptive claims. If these explanations work in the hard cases, such as moral and aesthetic judgements, then surely they'll work in the easy cases, too—in which case the idea that the easy cases are genuinely descriptive seems an idle cog, not needed to explain the use of the statements in question.
As first sight, it may seem as though these pressures push in opposite directions. Doesn't the first threaten to make everything descriptive, and the second to make everything expressive? So a problem for a local expressivist either way, in other words, but a very different kind of problem, in each case.
On closer inspection, however, it turns out that both pressures push in the same direction, towards a form of pragmatism that might be characterised as global expressivism. Contrary to some claims, this position does not lead to a homogeneous view of language, unable to make the substantial claims that expressivists wanted to make about the function of particular domains of discourse. What's lost is simply the idea that there is a substantial descriptive or representational function, characteristic of some domains but not others.
In this paper we explore these ideas against the background of some remarks by Simon Blackburn.

Minimalism versus Quasi-Realism: Why The Minimalist Has A Dialectical Advantage
Alan Thomas, King's College, London
Minimalist and quasi-realist approaches to problematic discourses such as the causal, moral and modal are compared and contrasted. The problem of unasserted contexts demonstrates that while quasi-realism can meet the challenge of reconstructing a logic of "commitment" to cover both "projected" and "detected" discourses, it can only do so at an unacceptable cost. The theory must globally revise logic, in spite of its implicit commitment to a substantial notion of truth for "detected" discourses.
Thus, quasi-realism fails to meet its own standards for theory acceptance. By contrast, minimalism does not face the problem of unasserted contexts, can give a global account of the truth predicate and can explain the univocality of the logical connectives. This demonstrates the dialectical superiority of the minimalist's approach.
The aim of this paper is to compare and contrast two research programmes, minimalism and quasi-realism, in their approaches to such problematic areas of discourse as the modal, the moral and the causal.
The two theories are in many ways very similar. They are both opposed to "quietistic" stances towards realism which advocate reiterating the standards of objectivity immanent in discourses from an "internal" perspective. As Blackburn neatly puts it, "loss of a global issues is not a global loss of issues".
Both views are similarly opposed to a completely "external" approach which classifies discourses in the light of a prior standard of objectivity, perhaps drawn from physical science.
Both views, in a Wittgensteinian manner, want to "place" discourses on a scale from the more to the less objective. However, they differ over the role of the concept of truth in this exercise, and I will argue that one ought to prefer the minimalist approach since the projectivist/quasi-realist alternative fails on its own terms.
I will first describe these two alternative approaches in more detail. Minimalism about truth is the view that an examination of the surface syntax and the internal norms of a discourse will suffice to reveal whether that discourse sustains a truth predicate.
However, this point is compatible with attributions of the truth predicate being supported by a range of different considerations relevant to the objectivity of the discourse. Thus, to take Crispin Wright's example, even if a discourse shows all the internal discipline and syntactic marks of truth bearing discourse, there remain further issues as to whether the discourse is representational, whether the properties it cites have a "wide cosmocentric role", and whether these cited properties can be characterised independently of human response. Wright looks to Wittgenstein's Tractatus as a paradigm of minimalism and expresses his own form of minimalism in a paragraph worth quoting in full:
A proposal is being made in a spirit close to what I take to be that of Wittgenstein's insistence in the Tractatus that object and proposition are formal concepts. The proposal is simply that any predicate that exhibits certain very general features qualifies, just on that account, as a truth predicate. This is quite consistent with acknowledging that there may, perhaps must be more to say about the content of any predicate that does have these features. But it is also consistent with acknowledging that there is a prospect of pluralism - that the more there is to say may well vary from discourse to discourse - and that whatever may remain to be said, it will not concern any essential features of truth.

Fictionalism, Quasi-Realism and the Question of Right
Michael Hicks, Johns Hopkins University
A well-known trouble in ontological debates, e.g., about abstracta, is tracking down just what is at stake in the debate. Simon Blackburn has claimed that such debates are best interpreted as concerned with the right to employ the vocabulary in question.
I argue that ?ctionalism about abstracta is a well-motivated anti-realist response to Blackburn’s question of right, but one that ultimately fails, in a suggestive way. The ?ctionalist herself ends up a subtle realist.

Quasi-Realism and Ethical Appearances
Edward Harcourt, Department of Philosophy, School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent at Canterbury
The paper develops an attack on quasi-realism in ethics, according to which expressivism about ethical discourse—understood as the thesis that the states that discourse expresses are non-representational—is consistent with some of the discourse's familiar surface features, thus ‘saving the ethical appearances’. A dilemma is posed for the quasi-realist. Either ethical discourse appears, thanks to those surface features, to express representational states, or else there is no such thing as its appearing to express such states. If the former then, by expressivism, the appearance presented by ethical discourse is false, so the ethical appearances are not saved. If the latter, it is unintelligible why an appeal to projection should be needed to explain how the surface features come to express non-representational states if no explanation is needed—as evidently none is—to explain how they come to express representational states. The conclusion of this argument is then argued to converge with some other considerations which show that there is no gap between ethical discourse's possessing the surface features in question and its expressing representational states.

Quasi-realism, sensibility theory, and ethical relativism = Le quasi-réalisme, la théorie de la sensibilité et le relativisme éthique
KIRCHIN Simon, University of Sheffield, ROYAUME-UNI
This paper is a reply to Simon Blackburn's Is Objective Moral Justification Possible on a Quasi-realist Foundation?' Inquiry 42 (1999), pp. 213-28. Blackburn attempts to show how his version of non-cognitivism - quasi-realist projectivism - can evade the threat of ethical relativism, the thought that all ways of living are as ethically good as each other and every ethical judgment is as ethically true as any other. He further attempts to show that his position is superior in this respect to, amongst other accounts, sensibility theory (or 'secondary quality' theory). According to Blackburn, sensibility theory succumbs easily to the relativistic challenge because it depends on some 'substantive' notion of truth. It is agreed with Blackburn that the threat of relativism is less of a threat to him than at first appears, although I think that it retains some menace, but not agreed that sensibility theorists cannot also counter the threat of relativism (although, again, ethical relativism retains some menace in the face of the sensibility theorist's reply). The point is that the threat of ethical relativism depends less on truth than Blackburn supposes. Thus sensibility theorists can counter ethical relativism in much the same way that quasi-realist projectivists can.

Quasi-Realism, Negation and the Frege-Geach Problem
Nicholas Unwin, Bolton Institute
Every expressivist theory of moral language requires a solution to the Frege-Geach problem, i.e., the problem of explaining how moral sentences retain their meaning in unasserted (e.g., conditional and disjunctive) contexts. An essential part of Blackburn's 'quasi-realist project', i.e., the project of showing how we can earn the right to treat moral sentences as if they have ordinary truth-conditions, is to provide a sophisticated solution. I show, however, that simple negated contexts provide a fundamental difficulty, since accepting the negation of a sentence is easily confused with merely refusing to accept that sentence. I argue that Blackburn's model-set semantics for his 'Hooray!' and 'Boo!' operators requires logical apparatus to which he is not entitled. I consider various modifications, but show that they do not succeed.

Quasi-realism and Relativism
A. W. Moore, St. Hugh's College

QUASI-REALISM IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY
From An interview with SIMON BLACKBURN
By Darlei Dall´Agnol
You have been developing over the years a metaphysical program known as “quasi-realism”. How would you explain it in a few words to our readers?
I think, the easiest way to understand my program is if we look back to people like A. J. Ayer, Language, truth and logic, Charles Stevenson, Ethics and language, and the expressivist or emotivist traditions in ethics. The situation in about 1970 was that the emotivists were very much on the retreat. People had arguments against them.
In particular, Peter Geach had, in a famous paper of 1965, argued that emotivists simply couldn’t cope with the way moral language is used. Specially, the way there seemed to have a moral proposition, which cannot, for example, ever be asserted. But we can, he had prophesized, wonder whether it’s true; you can say, if it’s true, then other things are true. So, it behaves in some quite complex logical ways. Geach had argued that emotivists or prescritivists like Hare, the famous author of The Language of morals, might have a story about what we do when we assert moral propositions. For example, “that is good”, “it’s good to be kind to your mother” etc. They gave an account of that along the lines of “hurray to be kind to your mother” or “be kind to your mother”, that doesn’t explain what’s happening when you say things like “if it’s good to be kind to your mother, then it’s also good to be kind to your father.”
You don’t say positively “hurray, to be kind to your mother,” but nor can we say in English or in any other language “if hurray to be kind to your mother, then hurray to be kind to your father”. The “if-construction” doesn’t work with the “hurray,” the expression of attitude. Arguments like this show that emotivism simply couldn’t work. You have to give a better account of the moral propositions, the content of the moral thought. You couldn’t say that when we moralize, we express attitudes because of this argument. By 1970 a lot of philosophers, I think, had been impressed by this argument. John Searle talked about the policy of trying to give an account of meaning in terms of speech acts. Other philosophers tried to answer in different manners. Hare himself wrote a nice answer in “The Philosophical Review” in 1970. Dummett said some things about it in his book on Frege. But, I think, there wasn’t a very good general account.
This led John Mackie, in his book Ethics (1977), to say that emotivism was right, but ordinary language, and ordinary thought, implied that it was wrong. So, ordinary language and ordinary thought were actually based on mistakes. This was his error theory: ordinary language is full of mistakes of what normative facts were. According to Mackie, emotivists are right in saying that there are no moral facts and ordinary language wrong when it talks as if there were. I was very dissatisfied about it, that is, I had very strong sympathies with the emotivists. I thought there was something fundamentally right about giving an account of the meaning of moral language in terms of the attitude it expresses when we moralize. But I also didn´t want an error theory. I thought it was not true. I thought that ordinary language was in perfect order. I read Wittgenstein who taught that ordinary thought is better than philosophical thinking.
So, I tried to attack Geach´s argument in a slightly different way and to give an account of the constructions, the contents of moral speech, to such a problem. I tried to give an account of what are we doing when we use language in that way. But that would be both an explanation of what we are doing and also a justification. It wouldn’t give any motive, any account of the content, of the reasons, of the motivations, of the error theory. So, that was the program.
I called it “quasi-realism” because it starts from with an emotivist, a fundamental expressionist, account of the fundamental elements of what we are doing when we moralize. And that is a particular activity, a particular thing you do, which is basically to express attitudes, to put pressure on plans, intentions, conducts. It’s something practical. But we talk as if there were a truth in that talk, that´s why the quasi. We talk as if there were a reality, normative reality, the kind of reality Plato believed in. Now, Mackie thought that that was an error. I said “No! The talk is okay, it is the philosopher who is wrong.”
The philosophers make the error when they are demanding some fact, some kind of Platonic forms in the world, or, in Aristotle, some kind of teleology of human nature. All these are philosophers’ stories about something which I thought could be explained and justified more easily. And, so, that was the program and it required answering Geach’s arguments, his technical work. I tried to do it. That work proved to be quite controversial. There are many discussions on this matter because, in a way,
I made the picture more confusing than people like. People used to think “expressionists say that....”, “realists say that....”. But I came along and said: “Well, why shouldn’t expressionists say this thing, which realist also says. But if it is an account of what he’s doing when he says it, then, of course, the picture becomes a lot more confused. The “quasi” proves to be quite tantalizing. People are interested in it. They also found it quite confusing, more confusing than I had expected. So, that’s the story.

Essays in Quasi-Realism Review:
"It is a genuine service to have Blackburn's work brought together....His prose style is extremely refreshing. He writes with clarity and vigor, without pretension or over-qualification. Fans of issues concerning realism will know that this is not faint praise."--The Philosophical Review
"Technically and historically accurate and helpful. Good treatment, especially, of moral realism."--Manuel Davenport, Texas A & M
"This collection well represents Blackburn's contribution to philosophy."--Ronald Glass, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse
"All these essays have been published previously, and everyone in the field will be glad to have them conveniently collected. They well display their author's virtues in advancing philosophical debate."--Utilitas
Product Description
This volume collects some influential essays in which Simon Blackburn, one of our leading philosophers, explores one of the most profound and fertile of philosophical problems: the way in which our judgments relate to the world. This debate has centered on realism, or the view that what we say is validated by the way things stand in the world, and a variety of oppositions to it. Prominent among the latter are expressive and projective theories, but also a relaxed pluralism that discourages the view that there are substantial issues at stake. The figure of the "quasi-realist" dramatizes the difficulty of conducting these debates. Typically philosophers thinking of themselves as realists will believe that they alone can give a proper or literal account of some of our attachments--to truth, to facts, to the independent world, to knowledge and certainty. The quasi-realist challenge, developed by Blackburn in this volume, is that we can have those attachments without any metaphysic that deserves to be called realism, so that the metaphysical picture that goes with our practices is quite idle. The cases treated here include the theories of value and knowledge, modality, probability, causation, intentionality and rule-following, and explanation. A substantial new introduction has been added, drawing together some of the central themes. The essays articulate a fresh alternative to a primitive realist/anti-realist opposition, and their cumulative effect is to yield a new appreciation of the delicacy of the debate in these central areas.