Projectivism or projectionism 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 people therefore project their emotional state onto the world and interpret it through the lens of their own experience. Projectivism can conflict with moral realism, which asserts that moral judgements can be determined from empirical facts, i.e., some things are objectively right or wrong.
Origins 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."
Hume's projectivist theory of causation Suppose for example that somebody is hit by a hammer, and sometime later a bruise appears at the point of impact. The impact of the hammer is an observable event; the bruise too is observable. The causal connection between the two events, however, is not observed or experienced, at least according to Hume. Hume believed that whenever one can claim to know something about the world, that knowledge must be derived from experience (see Hume's fork). One does not experience the causal connection between a hammer impact and the formation of a bruise. All that is observed are distinct events, occurring at the same place and time (Constant conjunction). Because one observes events of this type, one is led by induction to suppose that like causes will result in like effects, and from this one infers the notion of causation. This does not mean Hume doubted that one material object was able to cause a change or movement in another material object. It means that insofar as one talks about some cause resulting in some effect, it is not something one has learned of the world that is talked about because it is not derived from experience. Rather, one is talking about a feature of one's thinking which one is inclined to discuss as if it were a feature of the world. In short, when one believes one has observed a causal connection all one really has experienced is a conjunction between two separate events. One can only know about the world through experience, so causation as a feature of the world is something unknowable to a human being.
Non-cognitivist projectivism More recently, Simon Blackburn has been a major proponent of projectivism. 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 point for what the meta-ethical realist labels beliefs or even facts, like that one ought to feed one's children, or that one has moral values—real values that exist out there in the world independent of the self. Since these conative stances are essentially motivating, they can be called desires, and the realist may view them as desires connected to true beliefs about things that exist independent of mental construction. This is because as humans grow and develop, conative stances can become quite refined into a kind of moral sensibility. So for the projectivist, meta-ethical realists confuse moral sense and sensibility. The projectivist position holds that an individual's moral sensibility can become very sophisticated as they age and mature. As one experiences compassion, one comes to value compassion; or with gratitude, one comes to admire being gracious, and consider gratitude a virtue. But the projectivist is not committed to saying that an individual's response to something wrong (i.e. sense) is what determines its rightness or wrongness. The view is that the wrong-making features of actions are external, and they play a role in the development of essentially motivating moral sentiments that guide conduct. The view is vulnerable to a major concern for the ethical realist: projectivism may collapse into subjectivism or some variety of moral relativism. For example, it may seem that if Hitler truly felt the Holocaust was the right thing to do, the only possible projectivist response would to be that if Hitler truly thought he was doing the right thing, others might say he was wrong, but for him, it was right. But here, projectivism does not collapse into subjectivism. Where a subjectivist sees no moral disagreement (because they believe "X is right" just means "I approve of X"), the projectivist can allow for moral disagreement. A bigger vulnerability for projectivism is that it lacks explanatory power over meta-ethics, and instead explains it away. Projectivism may stand to meta-ethics as particularism stands to ethics.
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