In his earlier work, Blackburn had asked: Could a person start with a nonrepresentational idea of ethics, and yet end up believing what a realist believes? (In other words, could you accept that no external nonhuman authority prohibits murder or incest, and yet still proclaim them absolutely wrong?) Later, he carried the idea beyond ethics and into epistemology itself. "The figure of the 'quasi-realist' [is] a person who, starting from a recognizable anti-realist position, finds himself progressively able to mimic the intellectual practices supposedly definitive of realism."