Problems:

McDowell problem: how does experience justify beliefs if phenomenal-indistinguishability classes don’t come with any interesting veridicality conditions? Specifically, how can something with no truth conditions (mere experience) justify something that has truth conditions?

The answer is: training.

Human nature is such that when we see a bunch of examples we get an idea of what would count as going-on-in-the same way and in contrast what would count as making a mistake in following that pattern or rule.

So, when we look at a person who has had such a training we have two distinct ideas about their response to future examples: on the one hand there is what they are actually disposed to do, and what they would have to do to count as following their training.

I think this is how the mysterious juncture between merely causal stuff and stuff that we’d say could be true or false is effected.

Relative to a person’s training we can say that their being in a situation which looks a certain way justifies their claiming and believing that P. They then learn how to make claims like ‘seems like P’ and ‘looks like P’ in terms of their competence with claiming P directly a la Sellars.

Sellars problem: sense experience can’t entail seeing that P, since animals could have the same experience, but they lack the concepts requisite for seeing that P.

This doesn’t apply to the view above since I’m saying that being in a situation only *justifies* creatures with the right training, capacities, background information etc in forming certain beliefs, not that merely being in that situation includes or logically entails forming those beliefs.

Veil of perception problem: does this view require belief’s justification to go through experiences, thus disconnecting the perceiver from the world?

No, what justifies claims to see X is being in a certain kind of situation, namely one which a correct continuation of your training with the phrase would count as seeing X. training, phenomenal indistinguishability and all that apply to situations (e.g. that of a sober person wearing green spectacles looking at a white wall), not experiences.

Optical illusion problem: how does this view account for optical illusions? If we mush together looks and seems so that every way something can look has non-trivial veridicality conditions associated with it then we can say that optical illusions are situations S which look a way that has veridicality conditions that don’t include S. My view can also say what an optical illusion is: it’s when a relatively uncommon/un-psychologically salient situation looks like a distinctly different and more common situation (e.g. a straight stick in water looks like a bent stick out of water) and this tends to trick people because most things that look the way that both of these items look, are in fact bent sticks out of water. This theory doesn’t explain why some distinct situations look the same way to humans and others don’t, i.e. why certain things are optical illusions. But this is surely a matter for psychology and evolutionary biology (what kinds of things was it evolutionarally important for us to distinguish? What causal mechanisms for interaction with the environment does the brain have at its disposal?) and not for philosophy. What a philosophy of perception does need to do is say what it would amount to for a situation to be an optical illusion, and mine does this.