Appearance and Reality

Section 11.8 of "Consciousness Explained" is a Platonic dialogue between Daniel Dennett and his reluctant (and fictional) student, Otto.  Here is an excerpt from the dialogue:

Dennett: These additions are perfectly real, but they are just more “text” -- there is nothing more to phenomenology than that.

Otto: But there seems to be!

Dennett: Exactly!  There seems to be phenomenology.  That’s a fact that the heterophenomenologist enthusiastically concedes.  But it does not follow from this undeniable, universally attested fact that there really is phenomenology.

(Page 366)

It sounds very reasonable, doesn’t it?  “There seems to be phenomenology” doesn’t imply “there is phenomenology.”  Appearance does not imply reality.

The problem is with Dennett’s unorthodox theory of appearances, which he gives a few pages earlier in the same dialogue.

Now you’ve done it.  You’ve fallen into a trap, along with a lot of others.  You seem to think there’s a difference between thinking (judging, deciding, being of the heartfelt opinion that) something seems pink to you and something really seeming pink to you.  But there is no difference.  There is no such phenomenon as really seeming -- over and above the phenomenon of judging in one way or another that something is the case.

(Page 364)

Dennett seems to be saying that (for some proposition P) “P appears to be true” is equivalent to “I believe that P is true”.  If that is the definition of seeming, then “P seems to be true but it is actually false”, is equivalent to “I believe that P is true but it is actually false”, which makes no sense.