Are Shapes And Sizes Manifest Properties?
Do ordinary objects have the disposition to appear as the very shape they are? If we conceive of shapes as what I will hereafter call “quantitative shapes” i.e., precise quantitative properties exhaustively described with full numerical precision in analytic geometry, then it will follow that the shapes of manifest substances are not themselves manifest, i.e., the substances in question are not disposed to appear as they are with respect to shape. If the only shapes are the quantitative shapes then physical objects could not have any of the ordinary shapes which immediate perceptual belief attributes to them. Projectivism, whether polite or impolite, will then be true of shape. To see that this is so, consider how things are with our best physical models of objects. Any glimpse into the chemistry of surfaces teaches that in so far as the physical objects we sense have quantitative shapes, those shapes are not anything like the relatively regular shapes which immediate perceptual belief
