Abstract

The idea that we have direct and infallible knowledge of appearances is still deeply entrenched; and even scholars who reject this idea often still presume that our normal awareness of the shape and size of objects includes awareness of something like the shape and size of the image it projects onto the retina. I show here how these ideas are undermined by some new empirical evidence regarding these features, as well as by some observations concerning the phenomenology of size, the familiar moon illusion, and the persistence of illusions more generally. These considerations further suggest a path for dealing with the phenomenology of appearance more broadly.