Essays in Quasi-Realism

1. Introduction

Essays in Quasi-Realism is a collection of Simon Blackburn’s papers from roughly the 1980s and early 1990s that aims to articulate and defend a distinctive form of metaethical expressivism. The volume’s central ambition is to explain how ordinary moral discourse can legitimately look and behave like realist discourse—deploying notions of truth, fact, objectivity, and logical validity—while retaining an underlying anti-realist, attitude-based account of moral judgment.

Blackburn labels this project quasi-realism. The “quasi” signals that his view does not posit stance-independent moral properties or facts, while “realism” marks the attempt to vindicate, rather than debunk, the realist-seeming features of ethical language and practice. The essays collectively propose that we can “earn the right” to such talk by showing how it emerges from, and is justified within, our practices of expressing and regulating attitudes.

Central Aims as Presented in the Volume

Blackburn’s own programmatic description, scattered across the essays, foregrounds several linked aims:

The collection is not a unified monograph but a set of essays that nevertheless form an interconnected defense of this program. They move from the basic projectivist idea that we “spread ourselves” onto the world, through technical issues about logic and embedding, to questions about objectivity, reasons, and the scope of expressivism across normative and modal discourses.

The introduction within the volume is relatively modest; Blackburn largely lets individual essays carry the theoretical load. As a result, readers and commentators often treat Essays in Quasi-Realism itself as the de facto introduction to, and canonical statement of, quasi-realist expressivism in late twentieth-century metaethics.

2. Historical Context and Background in Metaethics

Essays in Quasi-Realism emerges against a background shaped by mid-twentieth-century non-cognitivism and its critics. Earlier emotivists such as A. J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson had proposed that moral judgments primarily express emotions or prescribe actions, but their accounts were widely regarded as too crude to handle logical inference, embedding, and the appearance of moral truth and objectivity.

Blackburn’s project develops within this tradition while responding to subsequent realist and error-theoretic challenges. He draws heavily on Hume’s sentimentalism and on the metaphor of projectivism—the idea that we project our attitudes onto the world—while reworking these themes with resources from later analytic philosophy of language and mind.

Metaethical Landscape Preceding the Essays

By the 1970s and 1980s, many philosophers held that traditional non-cognitivism could not survive the Frege–Geach problem and the demand for robust moral reasoning. At the same time, metaphysical worries about “queer” moral properties, articulated by J. L. Mackie and others, fueled skepticism about straightforward realism.

Quasi-realism in Essays in Quasi-Realism can be seen as a response to this dual pressure: it seeks to preserve the motivations behind Humean and emotivist approaches (especially their psychological and metaphysical economy), while showing that sophisticated expressivism can meet the semantic and logical standards that appeared to favor cognitivism and realism.

The work also reflects broader shifts in analytic philosophy, including the rise of deflationary theories of truth, more fine-grained accounts of speech acts and pragmatics, and an increased interest in how normative language interacts with ordinary descriptive discourse. Within this context, Blackburn’s essays participate in, and help to reshape, ongoing debates about the nature of normativity, the role of language in ethics, and the relation between mind and value.

3. Author and Composition of the Essays

Simon Blackburn (b. 1944) is a British analytic philosopher whose work spans metaethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. Prior to Essays in Quasi-Realism, he had already become a central figure in metaethics through his defenses of projectivism and expressivism, often drawing on Humean themes and contemporary analytic techniques.

Intellectual Background and Influences

Blackburn’s training in the post-war British analytic tradition exposed him to both empiricist and linguistic approaches to philosophy. He engages with Hume and the emotivists, but also with Fregean and post-Fregean issues about sense, force, and logical form. His work reflects sustained interaction with contemporaries such as Allan Gibbard, Derek Parfit, John McDowell, and others involved in revitalizing moral philosophy in the late twentieth century.

Composition History

The essays collected in Essays in Quasi-Realism were originally published between roughly 1980 and 1991 in journals and edited volumes. Blackburn then revised some of them for the 1993 Oxford University Press collection, sometimes clarifying arguments or updating references in light of ongoing debates.

Blackburn has described the volume as an attempt to “collect and organize” a series of related but originally independent papers, thereby making more visible the systematic character of his quasi-realist project. The collection thus reflects both the incremental development of his views over more than a decade and his retrospective effort to frame them as a unified response to major metaethical challenges of the period.

The essays are not extensively rewritten into a single narrative voice; instead, they retain traces of the specific debates and interlocutors that prompted them. This compositional history explains some stylistic and argumentative variation across chapters, while also contributing to the volume’s value as a record of evolving discussions in late twentieth-century metaethics.

4. Structure and Organization of the Volume

Although Essays in Quasi-Realism is a collection rather than a monograph, its essays are arranged to exhibit an internal progression from foundational themes to more specialized issues. Readers often treat this ordering as a de facto roadmap to Blackburn’s quasi-realist framework.

Thematic Grouping of Essays

The contents divide naturally into several thematic clusters, which roughly correspond to the parts summarized in the overview data:

The early essays lay out the projectivist basis and the “earning the right” strategy. Middle essays tackle detailed issues in the philosophy of language: how moral sentences function in complex constructions and how talk of truth and facts can be incorporated into an expressivist framework. Later essays focus on questions that many critics take to be the most pressing tests for any non-cognitivist view—objectivity, reasons, and motivation—and then widen the lens to consider other normative and modal vocabularies.

Reading Strategies

Because the volume collects previously independent work, commentators describe multiple viable paths through it. Some recommend beginning with essays on projectivism and then moving directly to those on truth and objectivity, using the more technical pieces on embedding as background. Others suggest following the printed order to appreciate how Blackburn’s responses to logical problems feed into his accounts of truth and objectivity.

The structure as published thus serves two functions: it documents the historical development of quasi-realism and presents a systematically arranged set of tools for understanding how the view deals with increasingly demanding philosophical challenges.

5. Quasi-Realism and Projectivism Explained

At the core of Essays in Quasi-Realism is Blackburn’s elaboration of quasi-realism and its grounding in a projectivist conception of value. Quasi-realism is an expressivist view: moral judgments are understood primarily as expressions of attitudes—such as approval, disapproval, or commitment—rather than as descriptions of independent moral facts. Projectivism explains how evaluative properties arise from these attitudes.

Projectivism: “Spreading Ourselves onto the World”

Blackburn develops a Hume-inspired picture in which we respond to non-moral facts with sentiments and then project these sentiments onto the world, treating objects or actions as if they possessed evaluative properties.

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We begin with sentiments, and end by treating the world as if it contained the values that those sentiments sponsor.

— paraphrasing Blackburn’s Humean projectivist imagery in Essays in Quasi-Realism

On this view, to call something good is not to detect a special property but to express a favorable stance toward it in light of certain features. Projectivism aims to explain:

Quasi-Realism: Earning Realist-Sounding Talk

Quasi-realism builds on projectivism by asking how a thoroughly attitude-based picture can nonetheless vindicate realist-seeming elements of moral discourse: truth, facthood, objectivity, and logical structure.

Proponents describe the strategy as one of “earning the right”. Rather than denying that moral claims can be true or that there are moral facts, quasi-realists argue that once our practices and projections exhibit certain stability, coherence, and responsiveness to reasons, it becomes legitimate—on minimalist accounts of truth and facts—to use such vocabulary.

Critics interpret quasi-realism variously: some see it as a sophisticated expressivism that preserves anti-realism; others argue it effectively reconstructs a form of realism in semantic or practical terms. Within the volume, Blackburn emphasizes that the projectivist basis remains central: despite realist-seeming surface features, the metaphysics is still one of attitudes and their projection rather than of sui generis moral entities.

6. Expressivism, Moral Language, and Attitude-Expression

A major theme in Essays in Quasi-Realism is the detailed articulation of expressivism about moral language. Blackburn’s version emphasizes that the primary function of moral sentences is to express and manage attitudes, though he allows that they can also perform secondary descriptive roles.

The Attitude-Expressing Function

On Blackburn’s account, when a speaker utters a moral sentence such as “Stealing is wrong,” the central point is not to report a moral fact but to express disapproval of stealing and to invite, reinforce, or coordinate similar attitudes in others. This is often characterized as the attitude-expressing function of moral language.

Blackburn aims to refine earlier emotivist and prescriptivist accounts by giving a more nuanced view of how such expressions interact with beliefs, reasons, and social practices. Moral utterances, on his view, are complex acts that both reveal and shape normative stances.

Beyond Simple Expression: Coordination and Reflection

The essays emphasize that moral language is not merely a venting of feeling. It also plays roles in:

• Coordination of behavior and expectations within communities
• Reflection on which attitudes to endorse, revise, or criticize
• Argument about consistency, implications, and justifiability of stances

Expressivists in Blackburn’s tradition hold that these roles can be explained through the dynamics of attitudes and commitments rather than by positing special moral facts. Moral discourse is portrayed as a structured practice of managing “patterns of acceptance and rejection” toward actions, character traits, and social arrangements.

Relation to Descriptive Content

Blackburn allows that moral sentences can also embed or presuppose descriptive information (for example, about consequences or intentions). However, he maintains that what makes them distinctively moral is their connection to conative or evaluative attitudes. A sentence like “Lying is wrong” may imply many descriptive beliefs about lying’s features, but its moral force, on his view, lies in the disapproval it voices and the practical stance it encodes.

This dual aspect—descriptive content plus attitude-expression—underpins much of the later work in the volume on semantics, truth, and logical embedding.

7. The Frege–Geach Problem and Logical Embedding

One of the most technically focused topics in Essays in Quasi-Realism is the Frege–Geach problem, a challenge to non-cognitivism and expressivism. The problem arises because moral sentences can appear in complex logical contexts—conditionals, negations, disjunctions, arguments—where they do not seem to be straightforward expressions of attitudes.

Statement of the Problem

In simple, assertoric use, an expressivist can treat “Stealing is wrong” as expressing disapproval of stealing. But consider:

1. “If stealing is wrong, then getting your little brother to steal is wrong.”
2. “It is not the case that stealing is wrong.”

In such embedded contexts, the sentence “stealing is wrong” appears without being asserted. Critics argue that if the meaning of “stealing is wrong” is simply to express disapproval, then it is unclear:

• How the same meaning is retained under logical operators
• How inferences involving moral sentences can be valid in the same way as ordinary logical inferences

Blackburn’s Quasi-Realist Response

Blackburn’s essays develop strategies intended to show that an expressivist can respect logical structure and validity. Central moves include:

For example, an expressivist may interpret “If stealing is wrong, getting your little brother to steal is wrong” as encoding a higher-order commitment: to extend any disapproval of stealing to disapproval of getting others to steal. This allows the same sentence to have a stable inferential role without requiring that it describe a truth-apt proposition in a realist sense.

Debates and Alternative Formulations

Some philosophers sympathetic to expressivism (including later Blackburn and Allan Gibbard) develop more formal semantics using tools such as sets of “planning states” or “hyperplans.” Others contend that the strategies in Essays in Quasi-Realism lean heavily on pragmatic or inferentialist resources rather than delivering a fully compositional semantics.

Critics argue that Blackburn’s account may not yet meet all the standards of contemporary formal semantics, while defenders hold that it shows at least in outline how an expressivist can preserve the apparent logical rigor of moral argument without abandoning the view that moral sentences fundamentally express attitudes.

8. Truth, Minimalism, and Moral Fact-Talk

A central set of essays in Essays in Quasi-Realism addresses how an expressivist can make sense of moral truth and talk of moral facts. Blackburn’s approach relies on a broadly minimalist or deflationary understanding of truth.

Minimalism About Truth

Minimalist theories hold that the concept of truth is “thin” and captured by equivalences like:

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“‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.”

Applied to morality, this yields:

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“‘Stealing is wrong’ is true if and only if stealing is wrong.”

Minimalists contend that these equivalences exhaust the explanatory role of truth; there is no further substantial property of “truth” requiring robust truth-makers.

Blackburn uses this framework to argue that once we have an expressivist account of what it is to accept or endorse “Stealing is wrong,” we thereby have an account of what it is for “Stealing is wrong” to be true. On this view, accepting a moral claim and accepting the corresponding truth-ascription come to the same thing.

Moral Facts and Fact-Talk

On this approach, to say “It is a moral fact that lying is wrong” is, for quasi-realists, simply a way of reasserting or generalizing one’s endorsement of the judgment “Lying is wrong,” using the thin notion of fact that travels with minimal truth.

Proponents claim this preserves the surface grammar of moral discourse—people can freely say that some moral claims are true, that there are moral facts, that we can be mistaken about them—without committing to a robust ontology. Critics maintain that such usage either smuggles in realism or empties talk of “facts” and “truth” of the depth many take it to have.

Relation to the “Earning the Right” Strategy

Blackburn presents the adoption of minimalist truth- and fact-talk as something that must be earned by showing that moral discourse exhibits the right kinds of discipline: sensitivity to evidence-like considerations, coherence, and criticism of bias. Once this is in place, quasi-realists contend, nothing prevents us from applying minimalist truth and fact predicates to moral claims just as we do elsewhere.

This treatment of truth and fact-talk serves as a key bridge between the underlying expressivist psychology and the realist-seeming vocabulary pervasive in moral language.

9. Objectivity, Reasons, and Moral Motivation

A further cluster of essays in Essays in Quasi-Realism focuses on how quasi-realism understands moral objectivity, reasons for action, and the connection between moral judgment and motivation.

Moral Objectivity

Blackburn distinguishes between metaphysical objectivity (existence of stance-independent moral facts) and what might be called practical or internal objectivity—the capacity of moral discourse to single out some judgments as better, more justified, or more authoritative than others.

On his view, objectivity is explained in terms of features such as:

Quasi-realists argue that when a moral outlook satisfies these constraints, participants may legitimately treat its judgments as objective, even without positing stance-independent moral properties. Critics question whether this captures the full robustness of objectivity that many moral disagreements seem to claim.

Reasons for Action

On reasons, Blackburn works within a broadly Humean framework that stresses the role of existing desires, concerns, and sensibilities. Moral claims about reasons—“You have a reason to help your neighbor”—are understood as expressing and regulating patterns of approval and disapproval among agents with certain broadly shared practical outlooks.

Proponents of this approach argue that quasi-realism can explain:

• How reasons-talk coordinates action and expectations
• Why some reasons-claims are criticized as mistaken or superficial
• How normative disagreements about reasons track conflicts in evaluative outlooks

Alternative views—such as robust moral realism or Kantian constructivism—hold that reasons may have a more independent or rationally mandatory status than quasi-realists allow.

Moral Motivation and Internalism

Blackburn engages with internalism about motivation, the idea that sincere moral judgment is typically connected to motivation. For expressivists, this connection is often straightforward: if judging that “X is wrong” is partly constituted by disapproving of X, a motivation to avoid X or criticize it follows naturally.

Quasi-realism interprets the motivational force of moral judgment as arising from:

• The conative elements built into attitudes expressed by moral claims
• The social and psychological pressures embedded in normative practices

Critics, particularly some realists and externalists, argue that this may not accommodate cases where agents recognize a moral requirement but remain unmoved. Quasi-realists respond with more fine-grained accounts of conflicting attitudes, weakness of will, and the complexity of motivational psychology, while maintaining that the intimate link between genuine moral commitment and motivation remains an important explanatory advantage of expressivist views.

10. Extensions to Modality, Aesthetics, and Epistemic Norms

Beyond morality, Essays in Quasi-Realism explores how the quasi-realist strategy might apply to other normative and modal domains. Blackburn argues that many apparently descriptive discourses—about what is necessary, probable, beautiful, or justified—may also be understood as expressing complex attitudes and standards.

Modality (Possibility and Necessity)

In discussing modality, Blackburn suggests that claims about what is possible or necessary can be interpreted as expressing stances concerning which descriptions or patterns we are prepared to accept across various counterfactual scenarios. For example, to say “It is necessary that 2+2=4” is, on some quasi-realist readings, to register a non-negotiable commitment within our inferential and practical practices, rather than to describe an independently existing modal fact.

Proponents of such an approach argue that:

Critics worry that applying projectivism to modality may not respect the apparent explanatory role of modal facts in science and mathematics.

Aesthetic Value

Blackburn also examines aesthetic judgments—claims that something is beautiful, moving, or elegant. He suggests these can be treated as projections of refined sensibilities and evaluative responses, yet governed by standards of criticism, education of taste, and shared practices of appreciation.

Aesthetic quasi-realism aims to show that:

• Aesthetic discourse involves disagreement, standards, and learning
• These features can be explained without positing intrinsic aesthetic properties
• The resulting picture parallels the quasi-realist treatment of moral value

Some theorists accept this extension as especially natural, given long-standing sentimentalist traditions in aesthetics; others maintain that aesthetic and moral discourse differ in important ways.

Epistemic Norms

Regarding epistemic language—talk of justification, rational belief, evidence—Blackburn indicates that similar expressive and projectivist tools may apply. Judgments like “You ought to believe p given your evidence” are interpreted as expressing endorsement of certain doxastic policies relative to shared aims of truth-seeking and coherence.

Quasi-realists about epistemic norms contend that:

• Epistemic evaluations express commitments to standards of reasoning
• Objectivity in epistemic matters can be treated via reflection and shared practices
• No robust sui generis epistemic facts need be posited

Opponents argue that epistemic normativity is too tightly connected to truth and belief to be satisfactorily captured in purely attitudinal terms. Blackburn’s essays in this area are programmatic rather than fully developed, but they gesture toward a unified quasi-realist treatment of normativity and modality.

11. Responses to Realism, Error Theory, and Rival Views

A significant portion of Essays in Quasi-Realism is devoted to engaging critics from several directions: robust moral realists, error theorists, and alternative expressivist or hybrid positions.

Engagement with Moral Realism

Blackburn addresses realist views that posit stance-independent moral facts or properties. Realists often argue that quasi-realism either cannot secure genuine truth and objectivity or, if it can, collapses into a form of realism.

Quasi-realists respond by:

Realists such as Michael Smith and John McDowell raise concerns about whether quasi-realists can account for normativity’s apparent authority. Blackburn’s responses emphasize the normative force generated within shared reflective practices rather than from an independent moral realm.

Responses to Error Theory

Error theorists, notably J. L. Mackie, claim that while moral discourse aims at truth, its claims are systematically false because the requisite moral facts do not exist. Blackburn accepts many of Mackie’s arguments against robust moral properties but rejects the cognitivist premise that moral judgments are straightforward truth-apt beliefs.

His replies typically involve:

• Recasting moral judgments as attitude-expressions rather than attempted descriptions
• Arguing that, given minimalism, there is no need for heavyweight truth-makers
• Suggesting that error theory mischaracterizes everyday moral practice

Some commentators hold that this amounts to a reinterpretation, rather than a defense, of ordinary moral thought; quasi-realists view this reinterpretation as philosophically illuminating rather than distortionary.

Rival Expressivisms and Hybrid Theories

Within the non-cognitivist camp, Blackburn interacts with other expressivist frameworks, including R. M. Hare’s prescriptivism and Allan Gibbard’s planning-based expressivism. He often agrees on broad motivations while differing over details of semantics or psychological underpinnings.

Later hybrid theories—combining descriptive and expressive elements in moral judgment—are not fully developed at the time of the essays but are prefigured in some of the debates Blackburn addresses. Proponents of hybrid views later argue that they can capture both the cognitive and conative aspects of moral judgments more directly; quasi-realists reply that their framework already accommodates both via the expressive function plus quasi-realist vindication of truth and belief-like features.

These exchanges help sharpen the quasi-realist position and clarify how it differs from, and overlaps with, both realist and non-realist competitors.

12. Philosophical Method and Style in Essays in Quasi-Realism

Commentators frequently note that Blackburn’s philosophical method and style in Essays in Quasi-Realism are distinctive. The collection combines informal, example-driven argumentation with engagement in technical debates about semantics, logic, and metaphysics.

Methodological Features

Several methodological tendencies characterize the essays:

Stylistic Traits

Blackburn’s style is widely regarded as accessible yet philosophically dense. Features often noted include:

• Use of vivid examples and thought experiments to illustrate abstract points
• Occasional rhetorical flourishes and humor, especially in presenting opponents’ views
• Preference for argumentative sketches that invite further development rather than exhaustive formalization

This style allows the essays to speak to both specialists in metaethics and readers with a broader interest in normativity and language, though some critics suggest that the relative informality of certain arguments leaves room for ambiguities or hidden assumptions.

Balance Between Formal and Informal Tools

While Blackburn does not develop fully formal semantic systems in the way some later expressivists do, he engages with logical and semantic issues in a way that is informed by contemporary philosophy of language. His method often involves:

• Informal modeling of attitudinal states and their inferential relations
• Appeals to compatibility, inconsistency, and patterns of commitment as analogues of truth conditions
• Strategic use of minimalist theories (of truth, facts) to avoid metaphysical inflation

This combination of tools reflects a broader methodological commitment: to reconstruct realist-seeming aspects of discourse from within an expressivist framework, relying on careful attention to practice and linguistic function rather than on positing new ontological categories.

13. Influence on Subsequent Expressivism and Hybrid Theories

Essays in Quasi-Realism has had a substantial impact on later developments in expressivism and emerging hybrid theories in metaethics.

Influence on Later Expressivism

Blackburn’s quasi-realism provided a template for subsequent expressivists who sought to reconcile an attitude-based theory of moral judgment with the logical, semantic, and epistemic features of moral discourse. Key lines of influence include:

Many contemporary expressivists acknowledge the volume as a primary source for the idea that anti-realists can “have it both ways”: explain moral judgments as expressions of attitudes while vindicating realist-seeming features of moral talk.

Stimulus for Hybrid and “Ecumenical” Theories

Hybrid theories—sometimes called “ecumenical” or “dual-aspect” views—aim to combine expressivist and cognitivist elements in a single account of moral judgment. While these theories are largely developed after the publication of Essays in Quasi-Realism, Blackburn’s work plays an important background role.

Hybrid theorists often react to quasi-realism by:

• Accepting its emphasis on the expressive and motivational dimension of moral language
• Questioning whether a pure expressivist semantics can fully capture belief-like aspects of moral judgment
• Proposing that moral utterances simultaneously describe and express, or that they have separable descriptive and conative components

Edited collections and monographs on hybrid theories frequently situate quasi-realism as a key predecessor and interlocutor. Some argue that Blackburn’s willingness to embrace minimalist truth and fact-talk already pushes expressivism toward a hybrid-like position; quasi-realists typically respond that the underlying psychology remains non-cognitivist.

Broader Impact on Metaethical Debates

Beyond direct descendants, the volume helps establish a new standard of sophistication for non-cognitivist theories, influencing:

• How textbooks present the trajectory from emotivism to modern expressivism
• The expectation that any anti-realist account must address truth, objectivity, and embedding in detail
• Ongoing discussion of whether quasi-realism is stable or collapses into realism or hybrid views

In these ways, Essays in Quasi-Realism serves as a central reference point for subsequent theorizing about the relation between expressivist psychology, semantic theory, and the realist-seeming features of moral discourse.

14. Legacy and Historical Significance

Within the history of metaethics, Essays in Quasi-Realism is widely regarded as a landmark text. Its legacy lies both in how it transforms earlier non-cognitivism and in how it shapes subsequent debates about normativity and language.

Transformation of Non-Cognitivism

Prior to Blackburn’s work, emotivism and prescriptivism were often criticized as unable to handle logic, truth, and objectivity. Essays in Quasi-Realism significantly alters this perception by offering a more sophisticated, technically informed expressivism that directly confronts:

• The Frege–Geach problem and logical embedding
• The role of truth and fact-talk in moral discourse
• The apparent objectivity and authority of moral claims

This transformation leads many historians of analytic ethics to treat quasi-realism as the paradigmatic “second-generation” non-cognitivism.

Place in Late Twentieth-Century Metaethics

The volume appears at a time when metaethics is becoming more tightly integrated with philosophy of language and metaphysics. It contributes to, and helps consolidate, a landscape in which:

Because of this, Essays in Quasi-Realism is frequently cited as a key text in understanding the shift from mid-century emotivism to contemporary debates involving quasi-realism, hybrid theories, and constructivism.

Ongoing Significance

The collection continues to be:

• A standard reference in graduate-level courses on metaethics
• A touchstone in discussions of expressivism’s ability to handle logic and semantics
• A focal point in debates about whether anti-realism can genuinely accommodate moral objectivity and truth

Critics and supporters alike often engage with Blackburn’s essays when articulating new positions, including robust realism, constructivism, error theory, and hybrid accounts. Even where philosophers reject quasi-realism, they frequently adopt its framing of the central questions: how to reconcile the attitude-like character of moral judgment with the realist-seeming features of our discourse.

In this way, Essays in Quasi-Realism has had a lasting role in setting the agenda and methodological expectations for contemporary metaethics, securing its place as a historically significant work in late twentieth-century analytic philosophy.