Do Things Look Flat?

Does a penny viewed at an angle in some sense look elliptical, as though projected on a two‐dimensional surface? Many philosophers have said such things, from Malebranche (1674/1997) and Hume (1739/1978), through early 20 lh ‐century sense‐data theorists, to Tye (2000) and Noë' (2004). I confess that it doesn't seem this way to me, though I'm somewhat baffled by the phenomenology and pessimistic about our ability to resolve the dispute. 1 raise geometrical complaints against the view and conjecture that views of this sort draw some of their appeal from over‐analogizing visual experience to painting or photography. Theorists writing in contexts where vision is typically analogized to less‐projective media–wax signet impressions in ancient Greece, stereoscopy in introspective psychology circa 1900 – are substantially less likely to attribute such projective distortions to visual appearances.