LITTLE LINK BOY

Well, I just can't sleep. last night I slept for about 4 hours, and last night I didn't get to sleep until around 9am this morning--and then I woke up at noon. that's not enough sleep considering how long I've been awake. Part of it is due to my having really bad heartburn, and part of it is due to my still be very congested--I just can't breathe very well coughing up tasty mucus every 5 minutes. I may no longer be contagious, and I may not be "sick" anymore, but this crap is just lingering. It's been weeks since I've really been well and had the energy to really concentrate. It probably also has to do with the fact that I have to give a presentation in my philosophy of language class, and that I have to come up with a topic for the final, for not only that class but also my Plato and Platonism class, which I still have several papers to turn in. I also have an in class midterm on Tuesday for my History of Christian Thought class. I hate in class tests, I suck at them.

I wanted to sleep and tried but was unable to do anything but lie in bed with my eyes wide open, tossing (the salad) and turning (the salad). So, I got up, went downstairs, turned on our cheesy fiber-optic 3ft. Christmas Tree (not Kwanzaa tree, of Hanuka tree, or Mohammed tree, but a cheesy 3ft pagan Christmas Tree).

Then I read "Quasi-Realism is Fictionalism" by David Lewis, which can be found in Fictionalism in Metaphysics by Kalderon. Fictionalism is a methodology that can be applied in a number of different spheres, including ethics, science, modality, mathematics, and aesthetics. Fictionalism consists in the following three tenents:

1. Claims made within the domain of discourse are true or false. (Thus the discourse is not a reinterpretation of kinds of speech-acts.)

2. The domain of discourse is to be interpreted at face value (i.e., not reducing predicates in the domain of discourse to mean something else. E.g., reducing all talk of mental states to brain states [physicalism and mind/brain idenity thesis], or reducing all talk of sensory perception to talk of subjective experiences [phenomenology], or reducing all ethical discourse to emotive discourse [emotivism], or reducing all talk of human motivation to talk about biological urges or repressed desires [Freud]. )

3. The aim of the domain of discourse is not truth, (and here, both are excellent) but to produce theories possessing other virtues (such as simplicity and explanatory scope). [This point is often connected with the problem of underdetermination in scientific discourse including scientific explanation].

Points 1-2 are perfectly in line with realist sentiments, but point 3 contradicts realism, for the goal of discourse, according to the realist, is to secure the truth of the claims made in the domain of discourse. This is particularlly important for the scientific realist (which I am not).

The fictionalist is satisfied with just plausibly explaining the phenomena. The realist (or the pessimistic realist) is not satisfied with merely giving a plausible explanation of the phenomena because the pessimistic realist knows that plausible explanations can still be false explanations, which is to say that good explanations are compatible with false explanations. Such instances of plausible explanations that were once widely accepted, but are now known to be false, are geocentrism, the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic theory of epicycles, blood-letting, and phlogiston theory. The realist is a pessimistic one because he is always striving for that true theory but keeps generating ones that are only approximately getting us closer to the truth. The fictionalist, on the other hand, has given up on the idea of finding truth in our domain of discourse. The fictionalist is just happy if we can even give a good explanation of the phenomena in question--whether that explanation is true or not is irrelevant because truth is not something we are after when formulating theories; we are after other features of the explanation, according to the fictionalist. So, for a fictionalist, the domain of discourse is descriptive of states of affiars and is taken to be as such, but whether the domain of discourse really fits with the way the world is doesn't really matter beacuse that's not the point of the discourse.

Being a fictionalist is usually a localized endeavor; that is, you wouldn't typically apply a fictionalist methodology globally--to all areas of discourse--but only to some. Hartry Field is a fictionalist about mathematics, Bas van Fraassen is a fictionalist about scientific theories (he calls himself a constructive empiricist). Some people are fictionalists about art criticism, and others are fictionalists about ethics.

A moral realist believes that our ethical talk is meaningful because it expresses true or false descriptions of properties in the world, properties such as goodness and badness, wrongness and rightness. If an assertion is truth-apt--capable of being true or false--then it is cognitively meaningful. And beliefs about ethics are truth-apt on the realist picture because ethical talk is talk about the way the world is or is not--that the world has certain properties. If an assertion is not truth-apt, then it is not cognitively meaningful. Thus, if ethical talk were not truth-apt, it would not be cognitively meaningful and ethical talk would not be the expression of one's beliefs about the way the world is, one's beliefs about certain ethical properties in the world. One's ethical talk would be expressing something other than beliefs. It would be expressing the speaker's emotions (Ayer and Stevenson), or prescriptions (Hare) or or attitudes (Blackburn). Note that an error-theorist still thinks one's ethical discourse is cognitively meaningful because it expresses beliefs about the world--just that all such beliefs are false. For this reason, since error-theorists do not attempt to describe moral properties (since there are no moral properties to describe) they want to dump all ethical discourse since it is all and always false. For them it is like talking about phlogiston or a flat earth.

Non-cognitivists, by contrast, do not think ethical talk is ever false because ethical talk does not even express beliefs, which are truth-apt. One's expression of emotion, or commendation, or consent is not a proper object of truth-aptness, since emotions and commendations are not beliefs. Cognitivism is the thesis that ethical assertions are claims about the moral properties of persons, actions, and policies, and that such discourse purports to refer to moral properties of those persons, objects and policies and that such ethical judgments are true or false, and that persons can believe the propositions that ethical judgments express. Non-Cognitivism is the denial of this thesis. Thus ethical realists affirm the existence of moral predicates and are congitivists about ethical discourse, ethical anti-realists (irrealists) deny the existence of moral predicates and are non-cognitivists regarding ethical discourse.

Quasi-Realism is the name Blackburn has given to his meta-ethics project that is encapsulated in his theory of Projectivism, a theory about the nature of ethical discourse. Basically, projectivism is the view that ethical talk does not have cognitive meaning since ethical terms do not express facts about the world or predicate true descriptions of the world (and hence do not express beliefs about the world), rather ethical discourse projects one's attitudes about any given particular ethical subject. For Blackburn projectivism is quasi-realist in that it accepts all that the realist is committed to regarding ethical discourse but without the ontological commitments entailed by realist discourse. So, the "realist" aspect of Blackburn is just that one retains the right to speak meaningfully about ethics, but just insofar as we construe that meaningfulness as attitude projections, not descriptions of actual predicates in the world. Moreover, what is realist about quasi-realism is that our ordinary language talk in not dysfunctional--it is not in error when engaged in ethical discourse, despite the fact that it is cognitively meaningless (contra error theorists such as Mackie, who claim all our ethical talk is in error since ethical terms and predicates always refer to falsehoods). Blackburn wants all the rights and benefits of realist discourse without the realism. This is my understanding so far. I still have more reading to do and I'm sure Blackburn would find fault in my assessment (since he seems to find fault in anyone other than himself who attempts a formulation and summary of his position).