Some Bacis Groundings

The Fictionalist Position

Fictionalism, as championed by philosophers such as Richard Joyce, posits that moral statements are akin to assertions within a work of fiction. Moral claims are treated as useful fictions; they do not aim to report facts about a mind-independent moral reality. Instead, they serve pragmatic purposes, such as coordinating social behaviour or expressing societal norms. Fictionalism maintains that individuals knowingly engage in a pretence of talking about moral facts, fully aware that they do not correspond to any ontological reality.

The Expressivist Lineage

Expressivism, tracing back to the emotivists like A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson, asserts that moral language primarily functions to express emotional responses or prescriptive attitudes rather than to make factual claims about the world. Unlike fictionalism, expressivism does not require the pretence of truth-apt statements. Rather, it understands moral discourse as an authentic expression of one's attitudes, feelings, or commands, which are inherently non-cognitive and thus not truth-evaluable in the traditional sense.

Quasi-Realism: The Expressivist's Mimicry

Quasi-realism emerges as a sophisticated form of expressivism that seeks to explain how moral discourse can exhibit many of the hallmarks of realism without conceding to a realist metaphysics. Blackburn's quasi-realism endeavours to capture the serious and committed nature of moral discussions, the appearance of objectivity, and the practice of treating moral claims as if they are truth-apt. This is achieved not by postulating a fictional framework but by demonstrating how expressivist stances can 'quasify' – that is, to take on features typically associated with realist positions such as consistency, disagreement, and the use of moral reasoning, all while grounding these features in a fundamentally expressivist account.