Does the Sun Look One Foot Wide?
Aristotle says that the sun looks one foot wide (De Anima 428b, On Dreams 458b). Writers in later antiquity repeat this claim without challenging it (e.g. Cleomedes II.1), though they are troubled to explain how it can look one foot wide given how far away it must be -- hundreds of meters at least! Their assumption seems to be that there is some illusion or trick of optics at work.
Does the sun look one foot wide?
Do stars look tiny? Do people look no bigger than ants when you stare down at them from twenty stories up?
People say these sorts of things, but how literally should we take them? Maybe the people below look normal-sized, but only very far away -- far away enough that there's something unusual about how they look that tempts us to say they look tiny, though really that's not quite the right way to describe how they look.
Or consider skyscrapers in the distance: Do they look small, or do they look huge? I find myself doubtful of both those ways of putting it. Alva Noe might say they look huge in looking small (but not tiny?) given how far away they look. But I'm not sure I understand that. One problem: Don't they look small because they look like they're less far away than they actually are? (In which case, they don't look so far away at all and consequently they don't look huge in virtue of looking very far away.)
If we say simply that the skyscrapers look like large things far away, then I wonder two things: (a.) Why are we tempted to say they look small? (This temptation manifests itself cross-culturally, e.g., in the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi); and (b.) What do we do about outright illusions?
Look at Poggendorff's illusion:
You know the line is straight, but it still looks crooked. Right? Likewise, could it be that although I know the skyscrapers are large they still look small? Surely it's too purist to say things never look other than how you know them to be.
There are outright illusions with distance -- things looking smaller, in an illusory way, than they actually are. (This is part of why we often badly misjudge the speed of large, far away things.) Such illusions should have a different effect on the visual experience of size than does the non-illusory visual experience of "smallness" with great distance, if the advocate of the view that skyscrapers look like large things far away is right. But I'm I can't seem to find in myself the required difference in visual experience.
Should I then simply get on board with saying that distant objects look small? Among other things, I worry that the geometry of that view will lead us ultimately to say that things far away look simply flat (or concave) -- with the unpleasant consequence that a far-away road receding to the horizon looks like it goes straight up. That couldn't be right, could it?
(And don't get me started on painters.)