ProtoSociology

Volume 20, 2004

World-System Analysis: Contemporary Research and Directions

Ron Wilburn
Pages 320-373

Moral Realism, Supervenience, Externalism and the Limits of Conceptual Metaphor

In this paper, I articulate a form of moral realism that I take to be of special promise. I hope to show, not only that this realist position satisfies cognitivist, objectivist and success constraints, but also that this position is particularly commended by a number of recent apologetic strategies that have been more commonly deployed in the defense of other non-moral varieties of realism. To this extent, I aim to show that moral realism, far from being a desperate or quixotic position, is a perfectly natural extension of analytic philosophy’s efforts to reform itself in spirit of post-positivistic recovery.