The inspectability of after-images has been denied. A typical claim is Ilham Dilman's: ‘I cannot say my apprehension of the after-image I see has changed but not the after-image itself’, for, he says, appearance and reality are one as regards the after-image. His reason is that this is a logical consequence of the fact that other people have no possible basis for correcting what I say about the after-image I see.

In order to entertain the argument to be presented here, you have to begin by casting away a presupposition. The ultimate aim will be to restore it again as a presupposition, but the immediate aim will be to test for and make clear its undoubted worth and usefulness by imagining what happens to our knowledge-system when we remove it.

Mark Crooks's article correctly draws attention to the ambiguous use of the notion of 'illusion' by Daniel Dennett in its arguments against theories that postulate the existence of qualia. The present comment extends that criticism by showing how Dennett's strictures reveal a failure to perceive an illusion in Dennett's own arguments. First, the inadequacy of his dismissal of inner registration is shown to be based in a prejudicial interpretation of the case for qualia. Second, his resistance to the idea of the non-epistemicity of the sensory fields shows him failing to acknowledge, not only the evolutionary advantage of such fields, but also that the flexibility and relativity of perception from person to person allows human communication to increase the rate of adaptive response across the species. DENNETT AS ILLUSIONISTMark Crooks has been both rigorous and fair in his critique of Daniel Dennett's theory of mind. He scrupulously eschews easy victories and pejorative dismissals. This shows considerable restraint as Dennett himself positively revels in portraying his imaginary opponents as fantasists, 'lovers of qualia' wandering bemused in the 'phenomenological garden ' (1991, 374) and given to selective distortion of scientific findings. However, as Crooks makes clear, Dennett blatantly goes back four hundred years to take Descartes as his straw man: Crooks' neat riposte that, if anyone had taken La Mettrie as the representative for all materialism, how ridiculous that would have appeared, only brings out how embedded old positivistic notions still are in current philosophy.Dennett, unfortunately, is a prime example of assumption of this attitude such that one can fairly take his omnipresent scorn as a symptom of his strength of his prejudice. A gross example is his confident re-pumping of our 'intuitions' via the notion of the CartesianTheatre (1991, 28). The argument goes that one is immediately propelled into a vicious regress of homunculi if one holds to the notion of a picture in

The central point is that Schutz's idealization of reciprocity, the matching of subjective intentions in the public world of interactive behaviour, necessarily involves agents in an ironic process. This is largely because, since they are taking so much for granted, they cannot be aware of what is latent in the intentional perspectives of their social partners. In bringing out the pattern of the irony of intersubjective dialectic, the argument makes plain the importance of pretence as a vital concept in philosophy, sociology and hermeneutics. The article closes with a criticism of naive optimism among purveyors of dialectic, recommending a proper concern with the irreconcilables of tragedy.

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