Go back to the scene we opened with two episodes ago — playing a song you care about for someone whose opinion matters to you, watching their face while it plays. Last time we read that moment as a demand: you wanted their agreement, and felt they owed it to the song. Look again — you do not simply mention it. You set it up: wait for the second verse, don't talk over this part. And then, once it is playing, you do something worth noticing. You stop listening to the song. You have heard it many times; you do not need it. What you attend to instead is the other person's face — a small nod, a change in the eyebrows, the moment they go still — and you wait for the point at which they turn to you and you can see that they have understood. If they check their phone halfway through, you feel a small drop of disappointment. You do not feel that when someone half-listens to you reading out a train time.
Set that against what you do when you report a plain fact. You tell someone the train leaves at nine. You do not watch their face. You do not much mind how they take it — whether it moves them, whether they come round to it. You have said the thing; it is true; they can check it; you are finished. There is nothing further you are waiting for them to feel. Reporting is like that, and it is meant to be. But playing someone the record was nothing like reporting. You were not informing them that the song was good, the way you informed them of the time. You were trying to bring them over to it. Call that recruiting.
Here is the claim that runs underneath tonight's episode, stated before any name is attached to it. Suppose that recruiting is all that was ever going on — not only when you press a record on a friend, but every time. Suppose that "this is a great song" was never a report about the song at all, never a fact you had found and were passing on, but an attempt to bring someone over, presented in the form of a report so convincingly that you took it for one yourself. Suppose there is no fact in there to report, and never was, and that what we have been calling arguing about taste has only ever been two people trying to draw each other into a way of hearing.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the sixth of nine episodes about taste and beauty.
Last time we put the thing back into the object. Hume and Kant had both taken it out — Hume relocating the standard into the agreement of the good judges, Kant into the free play of the mind — and we found the one account that insists there is genuinely something in the song: beauty as a real property, something you can be wrong about, something the person who cannot hear it is genuinely failing to perceive. But real in the way a colour is real: present only for the suitable ear, as red is present only for a suitable eye. A real property, and a peculiar one. And it carried a cost: we could not say what made an ear the right ear without appealing to the very beauty that ear was supposed to detect. Tonight we stop looking for a property in the object altogether, and return to the view you were holding when you came in — the one you reached for to end the argument: that there is no fact here at all. But we build it in its most demanding form, a version that hands back every realist word you use. True. Better. Overrated. You're missing it. The whole right to argue, to be wrong, and to be corrected — all of it, with no fact underneath any of it. It is the strongest case anyone has made for the view you held before any of these names arrived.
The philosopher who built this view into its serious form is Simon Blackburn, a British philosopher who developed it from the 1980s onward. He is not the person you take yourself to be agreeing with when you say "it's all subjective" at the end of an argument. He begins where you begin — there is no fact of the matter, no property of beauty sitting in the song to be tracked — and then he does what the casual relativist does not: he takes that starting point seriously and asks what follows from it. What he finds is close to the opposite of what you would expect. The casual version of your view demands little. His is the most demanding position in the series.
Start with the older picture underneath it. Long before Blackburn, the same Hume who built a standard out of the good judges wrote, in another mood, that the mind has a great tendency to spread itself onto the world — to take a feeling that is in us and attribute it to the object, and then to read that quality off the object as though it had been there all along. In a later work, the second Enquiry, Hume describes the mind gilding and staining natural objects with colours borrowed from internal sentiment. You feel dread, and the cloud looks ominous. You feel the pull of the song, and the song becomes great — out there, in the recording, as a property of it. Philosophers call this projection. The feeling is real; the attributing is real; what is not real is the property you then seem to find in the object. You placed it there, without noticing that you had.
So far this sounds purely deflating, and if that were the whole story it would be no more than the naïve view restated. There is no fact, so — on the naïve reading — the arguing is a performance, the standards are a bluff, "overrated" is empty noise, and everyone should relax and stop pretending. That is the conclusion the casual relativist draws, and the conclusion you drew when you came in, and we have already watched it fail. That was the second episode. Your own behaviour refuted it: you do argue, you do rank critics, you do say "overrated" and mean it and defend it — and a view telling you that all of this is a mistake to be given up cannot be right, because you are not going to give it up, and you are not wrong to keep it.
This is where Blackburn separates from the relativist you took yourself for, and it is the central point of the episode. The naïve relativist concedes there is no fact and therefore surrenders the words: fine, "overrated" means nothing, "better" means nothing, I was confused ever to argue. Blackburn says: concede there is no fact, and concede nothing further. Keep the arguing. Keep the standards. Keep "true," "better," "overrated," "she is the finer critic," "you're missing it" — every realist-sounding word — and keep the full right to use them, to be wrong, to be corrected, to improve across a lifetime. Keep the entire practice. Only stop telling a false story about what supports it. There is no fact beneath it. There never needed to be one.
That is the program, and it has a name: quasi-realism. It is an awkward word for a clear idea — speaking, with full entitlement, in every realist manner you already use, while holding that there is no realist fact behind the talk. All of the discourse, none of the metaphysics. And the demanding part — the part that makes this the hardest view in the series rather than the easiest — is the earning. Blackburn does not simply assert that you keep the words. He has to earn each one: to show, for "overrated," for "better," for being genuinely corrected, how that word can do its full work, mean everything it means to you, while there is nothing external for it to be true of. He has to reach every realist word and justify its use, starting from no fact at all. That is a very large undertaking, and the achievement, if it succeeds, is that he carries it through.
So return to what you were doing at the start of the episode, and redescribe it in his terms, because it fits closely. You played the record to your friend. You were not reporting a property. You were recruiting — voicing your response and trying to spread it, trying to get his ear to move as yours moves, to bring him into the way of hearing in which the song does to him what it does to you. That is projection in plain sight, doing its most human work. And it is not a dishonest or a cheap thing to do. Bringing someone into a song you love is one of the better things people do for one another. The absence of a fact does not make it empty, any more than the absence of a fact makes it empty to talk someone into a city you love, or into hope. There is no fact of the matter that Lisbon is the place to spend your one life, and people argue for it with their whole hearts, and they are not confused.
That leaves exactly one question, and it is what the rest of the episode is for. If there is no fact — if calling the song great was only ever you voicing your response and trying to bring your friend over — then how are you still entitled to say that he is wrong? How do you get to say "overrated," which means rated above its real worth, when on your own account there is no real worth for it to be rated above? How do you keep "better," "mistaken," "you're missing it" — the whole realist vocabulary, which seems to require a fact to answer to — once you have said there is no fact for it to answer to? The naïve relativist could not, and gave the words away. Blackburn says you give away nothing. Now he has to show how.
Take "better" first, because people expect it to fail immediately without a fact. Surely, you think, "this critic is better than me" requires a real standard she stands closer to. Consider what actually distinguishes the responses. A response can be more or less informed: she has heard ten thousand records to your few hundred, so when she hears this one she hears it against everything it borrows from, answers, and fails to be. A response can be more or less careful: formed on a good day, not while you are angry at the band for unrelated reasons, not while you are showing off. And it can be more or less wide: tested against the cases that ought to pull it apart. None of that requires a fact in the song. All of it concerns the response and the conditions under which it was formed. And "better taste," recovered this way, means simply the response that has been through more of that. The finer critic is the one whose response is better informed, steadier, and more widely tested — and you can say, plainly and truly, that hers is better than yours, and mean it, with no fact in the object doing any of the work. "Better" survives. It was never about a hidden score in the song. It was about which response had done the work.
Now "overrated" — your word, the one that convicted you in the second episode, the one supposed to be plain nonsense without a real worth to be rated above. Recovered, it costs nothing further. Out of all those informed, careful, widely tested responses, a practice builds up standards — not a fact handed down from above, but a real, hard-won, shareable measure of what holds up: what continues to reward the informed ear, what stops rewarding attention on the third listen, what was only ever the production and the image. That standard is built, not found. And a thing is overrated when the loud verdict on it sits above what that standard — your best, most worked, most shared response — would grant it. You can fail that standard. A popular record can fail it badly. "Overrated" comes out true, and precise, and usable, and there is still no real worth in the recording for anything to be rated against — only the standard the practice built out of its own best responses. The word does its whole job. The fact it seemed to require turns out never to have been doing the work.
And "true" — even that. You are allowed to say "it is true that this is a great record," not as a slip but as a full truth-claim, and all that does, on this account, is let you endorse the response while standing back far enough to submit it for inspection — to say, this is not merely my mood talking; I will stand behind this one; hold me to it. The word "true" earns its place as the act of submitting your response to the standard and staking a claim on it. You get to be right and you get to be mistaken — mistaken when your response would not survive the conditions a better one would, when you liked it only because it was summer and you were nineteen. Being corrected, then, is something that genuinely happens to you: your response coming into line with the one you would endorse on reflection, the one that has been through the work. Not submitting to a fact. Coming to hear better.
Which brings us to the sentence we bought at full price only last week: you're missing it. Recall what it cost in the colour account — a real property in the object, beauty there to be perceived, and the person who cannot hear it genuinely failing to perceive a feature present in the music. You needed the property to license the sentence. Blackburn says the sentence is available for nothing. "You're missing it" recovers as this: your friend's response has not been where the informed, careful, widely tested response goes; he is hearing it thinly because he has not heard what it answers to, has not given it the third listen, is hearing it through a grudge. He is missing it — not missing a property, since there is no property, but missing the hearing, the response the worked ear arrives at. And here is the part that unsettles the comfort you left with last week: that sentence, "you're missing it," comes from Blackburn sounding exactly as it came from the colour account. The same words. The same force. You could not tell them apart in ordinary use. Except that one paid for the sentence with a real property in the object, and the other paid for it with nothing in the object at all. Same sentence. Opposite accounts underneath.
Set this against the accounts behind us: it posits the least and recovers the most. Hume needed a fact about people: the convergence of the good judges, genuinely out there to be pointed at. Kant needed a peculiar standing demand built into the form of the judgment. Last week needed a real property in the object, dependent on our responses but genuinely present. Each of them bought the realist words by placing something somewhere — in the judges, in the demand, in the object. Blackburn places nothing anywhere: no fact in the song, no fact about the critics, no property, real or response-dependent. He begins with only people, only responses, only the spreading of them, and hands back the entire realist vocabulary the other three had to purchase with some posited thing. If it works, it is the most economical of the four by a clear margin: everything the others explained, explained again, with nothing extra posited. And it puts a hard question to last week, one last week cannot wave away: if you can have "you're missing it" with no property at all — if the sentence is this easy to recover empty — then what was the property for? Perhaps the comfort of "real in the way a colour is real" was something you were paying for and did not have to.
So do the part that is yours, because no one can do it for you. Take one of your own verdicts — one you say without hesitation and would defend to anyone. "That film is overrated." "She is a far better critic than I will ever be." "You are completely missing what that record is doing." Choose the one you would least like to give up. Now remove the fact from under it — there is no real worth in the film, no score in the record, no property of beauty anyone is missing — and try to say the sentence anyway, in Blackburn's way: not as the report of a fact, but as your worked response, formed under good conditions, submitted to the standard the practice built, staking a claim and inviting correction. Say it like that. It still comes out. It still means what you meant. It still lets you be right, lets you be wrong, and lets your friend correct you. The fact you were sure it rested on — remove it, and the sentence does not fall. That is the achievement, and it is real, and you should grant it its full size before we find what it costs. Because it does cost. Only not where you have been looking.
So where is the cost, if every word came back? It lies in two places, and the first is an obligation that is never finished.
Look again at what Blackburn actually has to do. He does not get to gesture at the realist words and declare them fine. He has to reach each one and earn it — to show, starting from no fact, how that word does its whole job. We watched him do it for "better," "overrated," "true," and "you're missing it." But the realist vocabulary is not four words. It is everything you do that looks like answering to something outside yourself, and the list is long and keeps growing.
Consider three more. The course of a taste over a lifetime — the way you can look back and see that you grew, not merely changed but grew, that your twenty-year-old self really was missing things your forty-year-old self hears. The existence of a genuine expert — a critic whose verdict you would trust over your own before you have heard the record, on her authority, as you would trust a doctor. And the plain felt difference between a verdict you would stake your name on and a whim you would be embarrassed by tomorrow. Each of these is a fresh appearance of realism, and each is a fresh obligation: Blackburn has to recover it, with no fact — and if there is even one he cannot recover, one place where the realist words make sense only if there is really a fact there after all, the whole program fails, because the whole claim was that you keep all of it with nothing extra posited.
So far — and his defenders have done much of this work — it keeps succeeding. But it is never finished. A new obligation arrives every time the practice does something that resembles tracking a fact, and the account holds only until the next such case arrives. You are adopting a view that is permanently one hard case away from failing. That is the first cost: not that it has been refuted, but that it can never complete the demonstration and call itself proved.
The second cost is stranger, and it is the one that keeps this an open question rather than a settled one. Stand back and ask what success would even look like here. If Blackburn recovers every realist word — if his no-fact account reproduces the arguing, the standards, the expertise, the correction, the growth, every gesture you make when you behave as though you were tracking something real — then his view and the realist's view predict exactly the same behaviour, down to the smallest detail. Nothing you could ever do or say or feel comes out differently on the two accounts.
And now you have to ask a question that has no settled answer, and that stays with you after tonight. Is that exact matching the vindication of the no-fact view — evidence that the fact was idle all along, doing no work, so that you should drop it and keep the cheaper account that explains everything the more expensive one did? Or is it the tell — the sign that you have been handed realism in disguise, a view that has to copy every feature of fact-tracking so faithfully, leaving nothing out and nothing over, precisely because there was a fact being tracked the whole time, so that quasi-realism is just realism declining to call itself realism? If it talks like a fact, argues like a fact, corrects you like a fact, and improves you like a fact, at what point does insisting "but there is no fact" stop being a discovery and become mere stubbornness?
Nobody — not Blackburn, not his sharpest opponents, not the field, which is right now genuinely divided over it — can settle that from inside the view. The very completeness of the recovery is what makes it undecidable: the better he succeeds, the less anything could tell you whether he is right.
Start with the conclusion you would like, because this is the view you came in holding and you would be glad to have it back. It says: there — no fact, he has proved it, the relativist was right all along, you can stop worrying and relax. Do not draw that conclusion, and be exact about why. The view that has just recovered every realist word is not the view you came in with. The view you came in with said there is no fact and therefore no standards, no being wrong, no point in arguing — and that view is dead; your own arguing refuted it in the second episode, and nothing tonight has revived it. Blackburn agrees it is dead. He kept the standards, the being-wrong, the point of arguing — everything the naïve version discarded. His achievement cannot be used to bring the naïve version back in. And the obligation is unmet: the account never completes, and the vindication-or-tell question is wide open. "The relativist won, relax" is a verdict, and no one earned it tonight, you least of all.
The second is the opposite, the one a tired realist reaches for: look how much he has to borrow — true, better, overrated, you're missing it, expertise, growth, the whole apparatus — surely a view that has to imitate realism that completely is simply conceding that realism was right. Do not draw that conclusion either, and again be exact about why. The borrowing is not a confession; the borrowing is the achievement. The whole claim was that you can have all those words with no fact, and watching him actually deliver them is watching the claim succeed, not fail. You cannot convert his success into your evidence. The faithfulness of the imitation is what leaves the question open; it does not get to serve as your proof that the fact is real. That is the difficulty precisely: the better the no-fact view works, the more it resembles realism, and the more it resembles realism, the harder it becomes to decide whether it is realism. Neither side gets to stand on that and claim the win.
The honest place to stand, four accounts in, is this. Quasi-realism is the strongest position we have examined: it posits the least and recovers the most, it hands back every realist word you were sure you would lose, and it is, by a clear margin, the best case anyone has made for the view you came in holding. And it is not free, and it did not win. It carries an obligation that never completes, and a question — vindication or tell — that no one can answer from inside it. It is the account still standing at the end, not because it defeated the others but because nobody in the field, right now, can knock it down — or crown it. It stands on an account it can never complete, and it stands even so. That is the whole of what it has earned: not the victory, only the standing.
Four accounts now, and each placed the standard somewhere different. Hume placed it in the people: gather the good judges, watch them converge, and the agreement is the standard. Kant placed it in you: a demand you issue alone and can never enforce. Last week placed it in the object: a real property, there to be heard, but only by the right ear. And tonight placed it nowhere — no fact in the song, no fact about the judges, no property anywhere — and then handed back every word the other three had to buy with something real.
Here is where it goes next. Every account so far — the judges, the demand, the property, the recruiting — has at least agreed on what the question is: whether your verdict about the song answers to anything, and to what. Next time, someone arrives and says the question is a distraction. That your refined, hard-won taste is not tracking a property, and is not a response you generously bring your friend into — it is your class position, speaking through you. That the spontaneous, most personal, most private thing you feel when a record moves you is the most predictable thing about you: predictable from your schooling, your parents, your postcode. His name is Bourdieu, and he does not try to win the argument the others were having. He tries to tell you what that argument was for, and whom it was serving all along. It is the reading hardest to grant, which is exactly why we build its strongest case next.
The one thing he cannot settle for you is the question you leave with. Blackburn hands back every realist word — overrated, the finer critic, you're missing it — with no fact beneath any of them. And it falls to you to settle it. When a view gives you all of that and asks you to accept that there was never a fact there at all, is that the view winning, because it has shown you the fact was never doing any work? Or is it the view telling on itself, because it had to copy every last thing a fact would do, so faithfully, that perhaps a fact is exactly what is there? Try to decide. You cannot — not from inside the view. The better it works, the less anything could ever tell you which it is. You cannot tell the vindication from the disguise. Both would look exactly like tonight.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.