Slezak, P. P. (2025). Who is the spectator in the Cartesian Theater? Philosophical Psychology doi:10.1080/09515089.2025.2573764
[Abstract]The “Cartesian Theater” is Dennett’s metaphor for the error of positing a homunculus or “little man” who watches an inner screen on which our thoughts appear – “the most tenacious bad idea bedevilling our attempts to think about consciousness.” However, I suggest Dennett’s analysis must be modified to avoid two significant mistakes. First, I show that, contrary to much academic teaching and scholarship, Descartes was not guilty of the homunculus or Cartesian Theater fallacy, as he explains in his physiological writings La Dioptrique and Traité de L’homme neglected by philosophers. Second, I argue that the Theater metaphor must be understood quite differently from the way it has been conceived by Dennett. Indeed, following Descartes, I suggest that the pseudo-explanation arises not from what is included in our theory to do the “clever work” but rather from what is missing. The temptation is not “to imagine an inner agent” but rather it is the failure to notice that a model can’t work without “an intelligent and comprehending reader” – the theorist. Finally, I argue that, once the error is properly understood in this way, we can see that it is implicated in several controversial theories in philosophy.
[Citing Place (1956)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section 4. Strong or weak illusionism?
* It is acutely ironic that Descartes’ [...] account of the problem [of the homunculus or Cartesian Theater fallacy] was essentially U.T. Place’s (1956, p. 49) characterization of the “Phenomenological Fallacy” in his landmark manifesto for materialism, an explicit exposé of the Spectator error which Place described as ... the mistake of supposing that when the subject describes his experience, when he describes how things look, sound, smell, taste, or feel to him, he is describing the literal properties of objects and events on a peculiar sort of internal cinema or television screen, usually referred to in the modern psychological literature as the “phenomenal field.”
Dennett (2016, p. 70) acknowledges his indebtedness and suggests that his campaign against the Cartesian Theater was anticipated by Place. However, Place does not argue for “Strong Illusionism,” the denial of phenomenal consciousness which Strawson (2019, 10) calls Dennett’s “Very Large Mistake.” Frankish (2016, p. 12) makes the same misattribution suggesting that Place “denied phenomenal properties.” On the contrary, the strength of Place’s account is his insight that whatever subjects say about their own subjective experience is compatible with whatever the scientist may say. This is not the denial of phenomenal consciousness since the reality of subjective experience can be acknowledged following Place and Berkeley as the error of imagining that these very experiences involve viewing an inner screen, the “Spectator” error.
* In some formulations, Dennett (1995) invites precisely what he protests are “daft” interpretations. For example, referring to the intrinsic felt content of subjective states, Dennett remarks “How could anyone deny that!? Just watch.” And again, Dennett (2016, p. 67) explicitly denies what other philosophers claim to be their “invulnerable bedrock.” Here Dennett appears to be denying how things “seem.”
However, Dennett (1991) also acknowledges that, although we are not authoritative about what is happening in us, we are authoritative about what seems to be happening, what it’s like. That is, despite professing to being a card-carrying Strong lllusionist as defined by Chalmers, Dennett also says consciousness is not being denied on his account so long as “you avoid presumptuous theorizing about the causes or metaphysical status of items you report.”
I suggest that these remarks are precisely the Weak Illusionism of U.T. Place which does not deny that phenomenal consciousness exists, but only that some of our metaphysical and explanatory intuitions are false. In this regard, we may note Dennett’s (2013, p. 312) formulations in which the intuitions that must be abandoned are not, after all, those seemings or incorrigible phenomenal experiences emphasized by Strawson and Searle, but our theoretical judgments or explanatory claims.