Contemporary Expressivism: Blackburn's Quasi-Realism

Simon Blackburn's Spreading the Word (1984) and Ruling Passions (1998) develop quasi-realism, the most influential contemporary refinement of the expressivist, non-cognitivist tradition running from Ayer and Stevenson through Hare. Blackburn traces the philosophical ancestry of his projectivism to David Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature (1739) had already suggested that when we call an action vicious, we are not perceiving some further quality in the action itself but are instead registering a sentiment of disapprobation that arises in the observer's own mind and is then, in Hume's memorable phrase, projected or "gilded and stained" onto the world, so that the action comes to seem, misleadingly, to possess the vice as an objective property of its own. Blackburn's quasi-realism accepts this fundamentally Humean, expressivist picture of the psychological origin of moral judgment, while denying that accepting it commits us to abandoning ordinary moral talk of truth, facts, knowledge, and objectivity.