  A provocative diagnosis of external reasons claims is as a bluff or a rhetorical device designed to influence the behavior and attitudes of others (Williams 1979). On this view external reasons claims are all false but stem from an attempt to apply nonrational persuasion on others rather than from error; recently some philosophers have argued that we either do (Kalderon 2005) or should (Joyce 2001) use moral claims as convenient fictions for this purpose. In later work (1989), Williams proposes, more temperately, that they may be ‘optimistic internal reasons claims’: likely false statements made in the hope that they may become true through the intended audience’s contemplation of them.