Variation and change in appearances

(1) The boat looks immense, yet it also looks small. Predications of ‘is immense’ and ‘is small’ applied to the same object appear to be contradictory, but (1) need not be contradictory. When do appearances conflict with each other, and how can this be marked in our judgements about appearance? In 1953, GE Moore argued that the possible truth of (1) shows that there must be multiple sense of ‘looks’. Moore’s example prefigures by thirty years a much-cited discussion by Christopher Peacocke about trees and apparent size with which Peacocke illustrates a contrast between sensational and representational properties of experience. I argue that Moore’s argument for different senses of ‘looks’ is unsound. And hence that we need a different explanation of how we mark the contrast between appearances which conflict and those which do not. I close the paper by offering such an account.