 There are two worries one might have about the rejection of the notion of an ultimate truth. First of all one might think that progress in human inquiry makes it necessary that we question what we now believe to be truths and perhaps replace them with other beliefs. Even a cursory acquaintance with the history of science will show that we are where we are now only through a persistent process of replacing beliefs we once held to be true, but no longer hold to be true. But it seems hard to explain what our justification for this is if it is not trying to bring our beliefs into greater accordance with the way things are. All we ever seem to be dealing with according to the Madhyamaka view is a purely immanent notion of truth where the only kind of truth we have access to is a reflection of conventional human practices and agreements. In response to this the Mādhyamika might want to make the point that it is at least sometimes advantageous to treat truths as if they had a more than conventional grounding, that is as if they were not just the product of agreement with commonly accepted practices and conventions. This is precisely because such practices need improvement from time to time, and since a spirit of inquiry is facilitated better by the idea that there is a mind-independent truth waiting to be discovered. The Mādhyamika could thus argue that for pragmatic reasons we should conceive of truths as reflections of an objective, external reality even though we do not think that there are any such truths in fact. We might object at this point that if the notion of the existence of at least some verification-transcendent truths is pragmatically useful, whoever believes in truth as warranted assertability then has to believe that some truths are not conventional, since asserting this is now supported by a warrant. But this will not just turn the anti-realist into a realist against his will, since his embracing of non-conventional truths is dictated by purely practical concerns: we are considerably better off if we build our inquiries on the convenient fiction of non-conventional truths. But they remain just that, namely convenient fictions; the anti-realist does not think, as the realist does, that the existence of such truths is in any way grounded by the way the world is independent of our interests and concerns.