Projectivism in philosophy involves attributing (projecting) qualities to an object as if those qualities actually belong to it. It is a theory for how people interact with the world and has been applied in both ethics and general philosophy. It is derived from the Humean idea that all judgements about the world derive from internal experience, and that we therefore project our emotional state onto the world and interpret it through the lens of our own experience. Projectivism has proved to be a problem for moral realists, who assert that moral judgements can be determined from empirical facts, i.e., some things are objectively right or wrong. Projectivism in ethics and meta-ethics The origins of projectivism lie with David Hume, who describes the view in Treatise on Human Nature: "Tis a common observation, that the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects, and to conjoin with them any internal impressions, which they occasion, and which always make their appearance at the same time that these objects discover themselves to the senses." More recently, Simon Blackburn has been a major proponent of the view. Blackburn's projectivism is a version of meta-ethical anti-realism. Blackburn conveys anti-realism as the view that statements which express moral properties are constructed, and realism as the view that moral properties somehow exist independently of moral agents. A further distinction in Blackburn's projectivism is that between cognitivists and non-cognitivists. Cognitivists believe that moral claims are "truth-apt", that is capable of being true or false. Non-cognitivists, on the other hand, believe that moral claims are not truth-apt—not capable of being true or false. As a non-cognitivist, the projectivist holds that ethical judgments are the product of conative, rather than cognitive psychological processes. A conative psychological process or state is something similar to a stance, attitude, or disposition. These conative psychological processes are in contrast to cognitive ones, which are what are typically thought of when referring to human beings "using their reason" or perhaps being rational (at least in the narrow sense). As highly social creatures whose success as a species has been due primarily to an ability to communicate and cooperate, projectivism holds that the development of a moral interest has actually been in humans' prudential interest. Blackburn's projectivism, which he calls quasi-realism, is based on the significance of the conative stances that are held. His idea is that these conative stances are the starting