Could the Visible Surface of a Physical Thing be a Mental Item?

The Sparring Partner offers the following tetrad for our delectation. 

1) I take this to be the visible surface of a desk.

2) It is almost certain that this in fact [is] the visible surface of a desk, but it is possible that it is not (it may be the result of a highly realistic virtual reality program).

3) If this were not the visible surface, it would be a mental item.

4) It is impossible that the visible surface of a desk could ever be a mental item.

The S. P. thinks that these four are collectively inconsistent.  That is not true. They are consistent on the following theory. 

My man sees something.  One cannot see without seeing something. This is a special case of the thesis of intentionality. What my man sees, the intentional object, has the properties of a desk surface; it has the look of a desk surface. What he sees may or may not exist. (Better: what he sees is possibly such that it exists and possibly such that it does not exist). The intentional object is bipolar or bivalent: either existent or non-existent. In itself, the intentional object is neutral as between these two poles or values.  If the intentional object does not exist, then it is merely intentional. If the intentional object exists, then it is real.

So far I have accommodated (1) and (2). 

If the intentional object is real, then it it part and parcel of the desk itself.  If so, then the intentional object is not a mental content. This should also obvious from the fact that the intentional object is distinct from the corresponding act: it is not contained in the act, and in this sense it is not a content (reeller Inhalt in Husserl's sense) of the act.  The act is mental, but is object is not mental, or at least not mental in the same sense. The act is an Erlebnis. it is something one lives through (er-leben); one does not live through an intentional object. Call the intentional object the noema. The noema is not a mental content but it it also does not exist in itself. It exists only as the objective correlate of the act.  It is other than the act, and not contained in the act, but is nonetheless  necessarily correlated with the act such that, if there were no acts (intentionale Erlebnisse), then there would be no noemata. 

I have just now accommodated (3) and (4).  I have shown how the members of the tetrad could all be true.  An apparently  inconsistent set of propositions can be show to be  consistent by making one or more distinctions. In this instance, a distinction between mental item as content and  mental item as noema. 

The answer to the title question, then, is yes.

Here is a simpler and more familiar example of how this works. The aporetic dyad whose limbs are The coffee is hot and The coffee is not hot is apparently inconsistent.  The inconsistency is removed by making a distinction between two different times one at which the coffee is hot, the other at which it is not.

Is the above theory, which I have only sketched, tenable? Does it definitively solve the problem? I don't believe so. And this for the reason that the solution gives rise to problems of its own. 

If a polyad is solved by the making of a problematic distinction, then the solution is stop-gap and not definitive.