 Anderson describes his position variously as empiricist, realist, naturalist, physicalist, positivist and pluralist, conceiving each of these as different aspects of the one truly empirical philosophy. But his use of these terms is problematic for the uninitiated. Anderson’s empiricism has no time for representational views of truth, nor for the traditional empiricist entities of sense data or ideas. Empiricism for Anderson is an ontological doctrine asserting a single way of being to which we as investigators belong. While undoubtedly committed to empirical investigation and the fallible nature of all propositional claims, Anderson’s empiricism is only secondarily an epistemological viewpoint relating to how we come to know things within this spatio-temporal world. Anderson’s realism rejects the traditional realist-nominalist options concerning the existence of universals. Universals are brought down to (spatio-temporal) earth, but there are no such things as pure universals nor pure particulars outside their roles within complex states of affairs. Mentality is a product of physico-chemical processes in the brain but this does not preclude our inquiry into the nature of mind as a field of conflicted tendencies, feelings and emotions. Whatever the special sciences tell us about their particular subject matters, philosophy retains its authority in questions of logic, that is to say, concerning the conditions of possibility of discourse. Indeed, modern science is badly infected by instrumentalist and technological views of its investigations and needs to become more truly philosophical and critical, more concerned with establishing what is the case within specific fields, and less with being practical and useful in relation to perceived societal needs (EMP, 290). Positivism then is for Anderson a commitment to what is objectively and positively the case, and not a program of instrumental or operational truth, nor a means of distinguishing meaningful from meaningless utterances. Anderson’s call for a “science of ethics” is not an assimilation of ethical inquiry to the standards of the special sciences. It is a plea for an objective investigation of the ethical, focussed on the existing ethical qualities of human activities, rather than on the pieties of traditional moral philosophy: the questions of right, obligation, duty and so forth. 