The problem is that you are using your definition of "I see X" (such that it is true only if X is a real object in the environment) to (mis-)interpret their claim "I see mental phenomena" (and is why your accusation that indirect realism entails an homunculus is a strawman).

The indirect realist might argue that "I see X" just describes the visual cortex being active in the right kind of way, regardless of what the eyes are doing or what distal objects exist, and so I see things when I have visual hallucinations and hear things when I have auditory hallucinations (and don't see or hear anything if I have brain damage but otherwise functional eyes and ears). This is a perfectly ordinary use of English vocabulary.

And the things I see and hear when I hallucinate have properties that can be described, such as their colour, and is how we distinguish between hallucinating one thing and hallucinating something else. Given that there is no real object in the environment when I hallucinate, the colours I see when I hallucinate are not wavelengths of light, or anything of the sort; the colours I see when I hallucinate are mental phenomena, and it is perfectly correct to say that I see these colours.

Seeing these colours-as-mental-phenomena occurs even when I don't hallucinate; it's how we make sense of the fact that different people can look at the same photo of the dress and yet see different colours. It occurs even when we all see the same colours. And it is only seeing colours-as-mental phenomena that satisfies the philosophical notion of directness, with seeing colours-as-a-surface-reflecting-certain-wavelengths-of-light being indirect.

You're just defining "seeing X" as "seeing some distal X" but obviously that's not a definition that indirect realists agree with. — Michael

Nor does it match how native English speakers use the word seeing. People suffering from psychosis may see things that aren't there. That's a completely normal sentence in English. Seeing is the experience, not the stuff out there.

In fact the colloquial phrase to say that you're experiencing hallucinations is to say "I'm seeing things".

Thanks for the clarification. I should just note that my earlier point wasn’t meant as a defense of indirect realism of any sort, nor as an argument that we never perceive external objects. The claim was narrower: given your own explanation of indistinguishability, an indirect realist can accept everything you say about mental imagery and hallucination while declining to posit direct perception in the good case on grounds of parsimony.

In other words, given your explanation of indistinguishability, mental imagery is sufficient to explain the phenomenal character in the hallucination case, and the presence of an external object makes no difference to that phenomenal character in the veridical case. That is what gives the indirect realist a foothold: they can accept everything you say while treating the external object as explanatorily superfluous with respect to phenomenal experience.

Thanks, that’s helpful. I think where we still differ is that the argument you quote builds in a phenomenological notion of “direct presence” from the outset. On the view I’m defending, epistemic directness is not a matter of what is phenomenally present to the mind at all.

I don’t accept (1), but not because I think mind-external objects are phenomenally present. Rather, I reject the assumption that perceptual justification must be grounded in phenomenology in the first place. Directness, on my view, concerns what our judgments are about, not what appears in experience.

So I’m not accepting the Indirectness Principle; I’m rejecting the framing in which it is formulated. That’s why I don’t see my position as either naïve realism or indirect realism as characterized here.

Yes, that’s broadly how I see it. Phenomenal experience is particular and non-conceptual, and for that reason it isn’t the kind of thing that can represent the world accurately or inaccurately. Representation, justification, and inference all belong at the conceptual level. Experience can condition and constrain judgment, but it doesn’t itself do representational or justificatory work.

That's good, because I hope there are no ships in your head. — Banno

Something is in my head, where "thing" is not meant to suggest physical, or not. It's like asking what's in the box. Is it a beetle, smoke, empty? The point is that it doesn't matter.

The hallucination of a ship has no referent, if our domain is ships and such. This is not a difference between the objects seen, since the hallucinator, by the very fact that they are hallucinating, does not see some thing; they have the hallucination of seeing something. That's kinda what hallucinations are. — Banno

I don't see why words with referents are to be treated differently than words without as long as both have publicly confirmable rules. The metaphysical constitution of the referent remains irrelevant.

The idea of a Mental image must surely be anathema to someone who has an understanding of the private language argument. — Banno

This statement feels like an over committment of what Wittgenstein is trying to say. There are mental images per Witt. The PLA problem arises if you try to establish meaning of the term based upon that image without correlating it to use.

We have mental images under any scenario. Wittgenstein can't deny reality, admit reality, do anything with reality. He's a grammarian. It's what we can talk about, not what is.

Austin is better here, going into sense and sensibilia in some detail. And not incompatible with Wittgenstein. — Banno

Yes, I picked up on the move away from Wittgenstein and (not coincidentally) just ordered Sense and Sensibilia prior to this post. It was clear your explicit discussion of metaphysics was motivated by something and I figured Austin or Putnam based upon your other references. But this is clearly not Wittgenstein (to the extent clear and Wittgenstein go in the same sentence).

Very generally I see this as just another iteration of the dualism problem, as in how can we figure out to fit minds and bodies within the same system. Witt doesn't eliminate the mind (like a materialist), but he just says it's not something we can rely upon for understanding meaning. Austin, as I take it, is trying to find a way to put his toe in the water by allowing us to do some metaphysics without running into the problems shown by the PLA. But, I don't know, my copy of his book hasn't yet arrived.

Yes, that’s broadly how I see it. Phenomenal experience is particular and non-conceptual, and for that reason it isn’t the kind of thing that can represent the world accurately or inaccurately. — Esse Quam Videri

Yes, in this respect, your position and that of the Indirect Realist is the same, in that phenomenal experience is non-conceptual and therefore cannot represent the world at all.

The Indirect Realist avoids external world scepticism by deriving concepts based on consistencies in these phenomenal experiences. Using these concepts, which can represent, the Indirect Realist can then rationally employ "inference to the best explanation”, to draw conclusions about an external world causing these phenomenal experiences.