he himself disputes. However, there are certainly continuities between both approaches. Blackburn argues that moral fictionalism is tantamount to us claiming to hold attitudes that we do not really have; that we are in some way insincere. In support of his argument, Blackburn invokes Locke's theory of colour, which defines colours as dispositional (that is, in the eye of the beholder) but in some way reliant upon facts about the world. Blackburn buttresses these arguments by further examples of quasi-realism in our understanding of the world beyond ethics. This means that, though the moral fictionalist is in some ways having cake and eating it, the quasi-realist has a seemingly even more difficult position to defend. They may feel secure in disagreeing with Bentham that talk of natural rights is "nonsense upon stilts" but they would also argue that such rights could not be said to exist in a realist sense. Quasi-realism captures in some important ways the structure of our ethical experience of the world and why we can assert claims such as "It is wrong to be cruel to children" as if they were facts even though they do not share the properties of facts; namely the inference of independent truth-values. From this position, Blackburn's "way forward" is to re-assert Hume's 'common point of view', or the ethical discourse common to mankind. Blackburn's thought is that though relativists and realists can agree that certain statements are true within a certain discourse, a quasi-realist investigates why such discourses have the structures that they do. Frege–Geach problem The coherence of Blackburn's quasi-realism has been challenged most notably by the Frege–Geach problem , which assert Blackburn's position is self-contradictory. Advocates of Blackburn's view, however, would contend that quasi-realism in fact provides an antidote to the Frege–Geach problem by placing different moral claims in context. There is an important difference, claim the quasi-realists, between saying It is wrong to tell lies, and It is wrong to get your brother to tell lies. Indeed, say the quasi-realists, the Frege–Geach argument exposes the insensitivity of some moral realist discourse to the complexity of ethical statements. References Meta-ethics Moral realism Philosophical realism