The Apparent Location of Mirror Images
When I gaze into a mirror, does it look like there's someone a few feet away gazing back at me? (Someone who looks a lot like me, though perhaps a bit older and grumpier.) Or does it look like I'm standing where I in fact am, in the middle of the bathroom? Or does it somehow look both ways? Suppose my son is sneaking up behind me and I see him in the same mirror. Does it look like he is seven feet in front of me, sneaking up behind the dope in the mirror and I only infer that he is actually behind me? Or does he simply look, instead, one foot behind me?
Suppose I'm in a new restaurant and it takes me a moment to notice that one wall is a mirror. Surely, before I notice, the table that I'm looking at in the mirror appears to me to be in a location other than its real location. Right? Now, after I notice that it's a mirror, does the table look to be in a different place than it looked to be a moment ago? I'm inclined to say that in the dominant sense of "apparent location", the apparent location of the table is just the same, but now I'm wise to it and I know its apparent location isn't its real location. On the other hand, though, when I look in the rear-view mirror in my car I want to say that it looks like that Mazda is coming up fast behind me, not that it looks like there is a Mazda up in space somewhere in front of me.
What is the difference between these cases that makes me want to treat them differently? Does it have to do with familiarity and skill? I guess that's what I'm tempted to say. But then it seems to follow that, with enough skill, things will look veridical through all kinds of reflections, refractions, and distortions. Does the oar angling into water really look straight to the skilled punter? With enough skill, could even the image in a carnival mirror look perfectly veridical? Part of me wants to resist at least that last thought, but I'm not sure how to do so and still say all the other things I want to say.
One resolution might be to strip away the specifically sensory, spatial sense of "looks" or "appears", assimilating to cases like "It looks like you're headed for a C" as I gaze over someone's final exam (cases which, in turn, might be assimilated to entirely non-visual cases like "It looks like we might be in Libya a long time" said after hearing a radio broadcast). That maneuver doesn't satisfy me, though: I want, if I can have it, some robustly visuospatial sense in which the Mazda looks like it's behind me and yet the restaurant table looks like it's in front of me.
(See also "Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear".)