PATRICK SUPPES

IS V I S U A L S P A C E E U C L I D E A N ?

Philosophers of past times have claimed that the answer to the question,
Is visual space Euclidean?, can be answered by a priori or purely
philosophical methods. Today such a view is presumably held only in
remote philosophical backwaters. It would be generally agreed that one
way or another the answer is surely empirical, but the answer might be
empirical for indirect reasons. It could be decided by physical arguments
that physical space is Euclidean and then by conceptual arguments about
perception that necessarily the visual space must be Euclidean. To some
extent this must be the view of many laymen who accept that to a high
degree of approximation physical space is Euclidean, and therefore
automatically hold the view that visual space is Euclidean.
I begin with the question, How do we test the proposition that visual
space is Euclidean? The first section is devoted to this problem of
methodology. The second section provides a brief overview of the
hierarchy of geometries relevant to visual phenomena. The third section
reviews a number of answers that have been given to the question of the
Euclidean character of visual space. I examine both philosophical and
psychological claims. The final section is devoted to central issues raised
by the variety of answers that have been given.

I. HOW TO APPROACH THE QUESTION

What would seem to be, in many ways, the most natural mathematical
approach to the question has also been the method most used experimen-
tally. It consists of considering a finite set of points. Experimentally, the
points are approximated by small point sources of light of low illumina-
tion intensity, displayed in a darkened room. The intuitive idea of the
setting is to make only a finite number of point-light sources visible and to
make these light sources of sufficiently low intensity to exclude illumina-
tion of the surroundings. The second step is to ask the person making
visual judgments to state whether certain geometrical relations hold

Synthese 35 (1977) 397--421. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 1977 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
398 PATRICK SUPPES

between the points. For example, are points a and b the same distance
from each other as points c and d ? (Hereafter in this discussion I shall
refer to points but it should be understood that I have in mind the physical
realization in terms of point-light sources.) Another kind of question
might be, Is the angle formed by points abc congruent or equal in
measure to the angle formed by points def?
Another approach to such judgments is not to ask whether given points
have a certain relation but rather to permit the individual making the
judgments to manipulate some of the points. For example, first fix
points a, b and c and then ask him to adjust d so that the distance
between c and d is the same as the distance between a and b. Although
the formulation I am giving of these questions sounds as if they might be
metric in character, they are ordinarily of a qualitative nature - for
example, that of congruence of segments, which I formulated as same
distance. No metric requirements are imposed upon the individuals
making such judgments. For instance, no one would naturally ask sub-
jects in the experiments relevant to our question to set the distance
between two points to be approximately 1.3 meters or to determine an
angle of, say, 21 degrees.
Once such judgments are obtained, whether on the basis of fixed
relations or by adjusting the position of points, the formal or mathemati-
cal question to ask is whether the finite relational structure can be
embedded in a two- or three-dimensional Euclidean space. The dimen-
sionality depends upon the character of the experiment. In many cases
the points will be restricted to a plane and therefore embedding in two
dimensions is required; in other cases embedding in three dimensions is
appropriate. By a finite relational structure I mean a relational structure
whose domain is finite. To give a simple example, suppose that A is the
finite set of points and the judgments we have asked for are judgments of
equidistance of points. Let E be the quaternary relation of equidistance.
Then to say that the finite relational structure 9~ = (A, E ) can be embed-
ded in three-dimensional Euclidean space is to say that there exists a
function ~0 defined on A such that q~ maps A into the set of triples of real
numbers and such that for every a, b, c, and d in A the following relation
holds:
3 3
abEcd iff Y'. (~oi(a)-~oi(b)) 2= Y'. (~pi(c)-~oi(d)) 2,
i=l i=l
 IS V I S U A L SPACE EUCLIDEAN? 399

where ~0i(a) is the ith coordinate of q~(a).

Note that the mapping into triples of real numbers is just mapping visual
points into a Cartesian representation of three-dimensional Euclidean
space.
In principle, it is straightforward to answer the question raised by this
embedding procedure. So that, given a set of data from an individual's
visual judgments of equidistance between points, we can determine in a
definite and constructive mathematical manner whether such embedding
is possible.
Immediately, however, a problem arises. This problem can be grasped
by considering the analogous physical situation. Suppose we are making
observations of the stars and want to test a similar proposition, or some
more complex proposition of celestial mechanics. We are faced with the
problem recognized early in the history of astronomy, and also in the
history of geodetic surveys, that the data are bound not to fit the
theoretical model exactly. The classical way of putting this is that errors of
measurement arise, and our problem is to determine if the model fits the
data within the limits of the error of measurement. In examining data on
the advancement of the perihelion of Mercury, which is one of the
important tests of Einstein's general theory of relativity, the most tedious
and difficult aspect of the data analysis is to determine whether the theory
and the observations are in agreement within the estimated error of
measurement.
Laplace, for example, used such methods with unparalleled success. He
would examine data from some particular aspect of the solar system, for
example, irregularities in the motion of Jupiter and Saturn, and would
then raise the question of whether these observed irregularities were due
to errors of measurement or to the existence of 'constant' causes. When
the irregularities were too great to be accounted for by errors of measure-
ment, he then searched for a constant cause to explain the deviations from
the simpler model of the phenomena. In the case mentioned, the
irregularities in the motion of Jupiter and Saturn, he was able to explain
them as being due to the mutual gravitational attraction of the two
planets, which had been ignored in the simple theory of their motion. But
Laplace's situation is different from the present one in the following
important respect. The data he was examining were already rendered in
400 PATRICK SUPPES

quantitative form and there was no question of having a numerical

representation. Our problem is that we start from qualitative judgments
and we are faced with the problem of simultaneously assigning a meas-
urement and determining the error of that measurement. Because of the
complexity and sublety of the statistical questions concerning errors of
measurement in the present setting, for purposes of simplification I shall
ignore them, but it is absolutely essential to recognize that they must be
dealt with in any detailed analysis of experimental data.
Returning to the formal problem of embedding qualitative relations
among a finite set of points into a given space, it is surprising to find that
the results of the kinds that are needed in the present context are not
really present in the enormous mathematical literature on geometry.
There is a very large literature on finite geometries; for example,
Dembowski (1968) contains over 1200 references. Moreover, the tradi-
tion of considering finite geometries goes back at least to the beginning of
this century. Construction of such geometries by Veblen and others was a
fruitful source of models for proving independence of axioms, etc. On the
other hand, the literature that culminates in Dembowski's magisterial
survey consists almost entirely of projective and affine geometries that
have a relatively weak structure. From a mathematical standpoint, such
structures have been of considerable interest in connection with a variety
of problems in abstract algebra. The corresponding theory of finite
geometries of a stronger type, for example, finite Euclidean, finite elliptic,
or finite hyperbolic geometries, is scarcely developed at all. As a result,
the experimental literature does not deal directly with such finite geome-
tries, although they are a natural extension of the weaker finite geometries
on the one hand and finite measurement structures on the other.
A second basic methodological approach to the geometrical character
of visual space is to assume that a standard metric representation already
exists and then to examine which kind of space best fits the data. An
excellent example of this methodology is to be found in various publica-
tions of Foley (1965, 1972). Foley shows experimentally that the size-
distance invariance hypothesis, which asserts that the perceived size-
distance ratio is equal to the physical size-distance ratio, is grossly
incorrect. At the same time he also shows that perceived visual angles are
about ten percent greater than physical angles. These studies are con-
ducted on the assumption that a variety of more primitive and elementary
 IS VISUAL SPACE EUCLIDEAN? 401

axioms are satisfied. In contrast, Luneburg (1948) assumes that the

perceived visual angle equals the physical angle, that is, that the transfor-
mation between the two is conformal, but what is back of the use of this
assumption is a whole variety of assumptions that both physical space and
visual space are homogeneous spaces of constant curvature, that is, are
Riemannian spaces, and essentially Luneburg does not propose to test in
any serious way the many consequences implied by this very rich assump-
tion of having a homogeneous space with constant curvature. In other
words, in this second approach there is no serious attempt to provide tests
that will show if all of the axioms that hold for a given type of space are
satisfied.
A third approach is to go back to the well-known Helmholtz-Lie
problem of the nature of space and to replace finiteness by questions of
continuity and motion. In a famous lecture of 1854, Riemann
(1854/1892) discussed the hypotheses on which the foundations of
geometry lie. More than a decade later, Helmholtz (1868)responded in a
paper entitled '~Jber die Tatsachen, die der Geometrie zugrunde liegen'.
The basic argument of Helmholtz's paper was that, although arbitrary
Riemannian spaces are conceivable, actual physical space has as an
essential feature the free mobility of rigid bodies. From a mathematical
standpoint, such motions are characterized in metric geometry as trans-
formations of a space onto itself that preserve distances. Such transfor-
mations are called isometries. Because of the extensivemathematical
development of the topic (for modern review, see Busemann, 1955,
Section 48, or Freudenthal, 1965), an excellent body of formal results is
available as tools to be used in the investigation of the character of visual
space. Under various axiomatizations of the Helmholtz-Lie approach it
can be proved that the only spaces satisfying the axioms are the following
three kinds of elementary spaces: Euclidean, hyperbolic, and spherical.
From a philosophical standpoint, it is important to recognize that
considerations of continuity and motion are probably more fundamental
in the analysis of the nature of visual space than the mathematically more
elementary properties of finite spaces. Unfortunately, I am not able to
report any experimental literature that uses the Helmholtz-Lie approach
as a way of investigating the nature of visual space, although it is implicit
in some of the results reported below that it would be difficult to interpret
the experimental results as satisfying an axiom of free mobility. Let me be
402 PATRICK SUPPES

clear on this point. Some of the experimental investigations lead to the

result that visual space cannot be elementary in the sense just defined, but
these investigations do not explicitly use the kind of approach to motion
suggested by the rich mathematical developments that have followed in
response to the Helmholtz-Lie problem.
A fourth approach that lies outside the main body of the literature to be
considered in this paper is the recent al~proach through picture grammars
and the analysis of perceptual scenes. Its growing literature has been in
response especially to problems of pattern recognition that center on
construction of computer programs and peripheral devices that have
rudimentary perceptual capacities. Although this approach has a formal
character quite different from the others considered and it has not been
used to address directly the question about the Euclidean character of
space, it should be mentioned because it does provide an approach that in
many respects is very natural psychologically and that is in certain aspects
more closely connected to the psychology of perception than most of the
classical geometric approaches that have been used thus far in the analysis
of visual space. (An elementary introduction and references to the
literature are to be found in Suppes and Rottmayer, 1974; an ency-
clopedic review is given by Fu, 1974.)
A typical picture grammar has the following character. Finite line
segments or finite curves of a given length and with a given orientation are
concatenated together as basic elements to form geometrical figures of
greater complexity. A typical problem in the literature of pattern recogni-
tion is to provide such a concatenation (not necessarily one dimensional)
so as to construct handwritten characters, or, as a specialized example
that has received a fair amount of attention, to recognize handwritten
mathematical symbols. These approaches are often labeled picture gram-
mars because they adopt the approach used i.n mathematical linguistics
for writing phrase-structure grammars to generate linguistic utterances.
Picture grammars can in fact be characterized as context free, context
sensitive, etc., depending upon the exact character of the rules of produc-
tion. What is missing is the question, Can the set of figures generated by
the picture grammars be embedded in Euclidean space or other metric
spaces of an elementary character? This question would seem to have
some conceptual interest from the standpoint of the theory of perception.
It is clearly not of the same importance for the theory of pattern
 IS VISUAL SPACE EUCLIDEAN? 403

recognition. Picture grammars base perception on a set of primitive

concepts that seem much more natural than the more abstract concepts
familiar in classical geometry. They would seem to represent an excellent
approach for exploration of the character of visual space but I am unable
to cite references that test these ideas experimentally.

II. THE HIERARCHY OF GEOMETRIES

Those who have declared that visual space is not Euclidean have usually
had a well-defined alternative in mind. The most popular candidates have
been claims that visual space is either elliptic or hyperbolic, although
some more radical theses are implicit in some of the experimental work.
How the various geometries are to be related hierarchically is not
entirely a simple matter, for by different methods of specialization one
may be obtained from another. A reasonably natural hierarchy for
purposes of talking about visual space is shown in Fig. 1. In the figure, I

Projective Ordered

Elliptic Absolute

EucIidean Hyperbolic

Fig. 1. Hierarchyof geometries.

have also referred to geometries rather than to spaces, although from a

certain conceptual standpoint the latter is preferable. I have held to the
language of geometries in deference to tradition in the literature on visual
space. The weakest geometry considered here is either projective
geometry on the left-hand side at the top of the figure or ordered
geometry at the right. There are various natural primitive concepts for
projective geometry. Fundamental in any case is the concept of incidence
and, once order is introduced, the concept of separation. In contrast,
ordered geometry is based upon the single ternary relation of between-
ness holding for three points in the fashion standard for Euclidean
404 PATRICK SUPPES

geometry, but of course axioms based only upon betweenness are weaker
than those required for Euclidean geometry. Without entering into
technical details, elliptic geometry of the plane is obtained from projec-
tive geometry by defining it as the geometry corresponding to the group
of projective collineations that leave an imaginary ellipse invariant in the
projective plane. Although elliptic geometry has been important in the
consideration of visual space, as we shall see later, the details of elliptic
geometry are complicated and subtle, and as far as I know have not
actually been adequately studied in detail in relation to any serious body
of experimental data.
Turning now to the right-hand side of Figure 1, affine geometry is
obtained from ordered geometry by adding Euclid's axiom that, given
a line and a point external to the line, there is at most one line (i)
through the point, (ii) in the plane formed by the point and the line, and
(iii) that does not meet the line. Going in the other direction from ordered
geometry in Figure 1, we obtain absolute geometry by adding the concept
of congruence of segments, which is just the notion of equidistance
mentioned earlier. We add Euclid's axiom to absolute geometry to obtain
Euclidean geometry, and we add the negation of Euclid's axiom to
absolute geometry to obtain hyperbolic geometry. These are the only two
extensions of absolute geometry. Given the fundamental character of
absolute geometry in relation to the claims often made that visual space is
either Euclidean or hyperbolic, it is somewhat surprising that there has
been no more detailed investigation experimentally of whether the
axioms of absolute geometry hold for visual space.
There is another way of organizing the hierarchy of geometries in terms
of metric spaces. Recall that a metric space is a pair (A, d) such that A is a
nonempty set, d is a real-valued function defined on the Cartesian
product A x A, and for all a, b, c in A,

Axioml. d(a,a)=O andif a#b,d(a,b)>O;

Axiom 2. d(a, b) = d(b, a);
Axiom 3. d(a, b)+d(b, c)>~d(a, c).

The elements of the set A are called points. The first axiom asserts that
distances are positive, except for the distance between identical points,
which is zero. The second axiom asserts that distance is symmetric; that is,
 IS V I S U A L SPACE EUCLIDEAN? 405

it is a function only of the unordered pair of points, not a function of their

order. The third axiom is the triangle inequality. Most of the metric
spaces important for the theory of perception have the property that any
two points can be joined by a segment. Such spaces are called metric
spaces with additive segments. These spaces are naturally divided into
two broad subclasses, affine metrics and coordinate-free metrics. By
further specialization of each of these subclasses we are led naturally to
the Euclidean, hyperbolic, and spherical spaces, as well as to generaliza-
tions of the Euclidean metric in terms of what are called Minkowski
metrics. An important subclass of the coordinate-free metrics is the
Riemannian metrics. It may be shown that the only spaces that are
Riemannian and affine metric are either Euclidean or hyperbolic. We
shall not use these concepts in detail, but it is important to mention that
this alternative hierarchy of metric spaces is as natural to use as the more
classical hierarchy exhibited in Figure 1.
All of the concepts I have introduced in this brief survey of the
hierarchy of geometries are familiar in the mathematical literature of
geometry.

III. EXPERIMENTAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANSWERS

My main purpose in this section is to provide a survey of the answers that

have been given. A summary is provided in Table 1.
The natural place to begin is with Euclid's Optics, the oldest extant
treatise on mathematical optics. It is important to emphasize that Euclid's
Optics is really a theory of vision and not a treatise on physical optics. A
large number of the propositions are concerned with vision from the
standpoint of perspective in monocular vision. Indeed, Euclid's Optics
could be characterized as a treatise on perspective within Euclidean
geometry. The tone of Euclid's treatise can be seen from quoting the
initial part, which consists of seven 'definitions'.

1. Let it be assumed that lines drawn directly from the eye pass through a space of great
extent;
2. and that the form of the space included within our vision is a cone, with its apex in the
eye and its base at the limits of our vision;
3. and that those things upon which the vision falls are seen, and that those things upon
which the vision does not fall are not seen;
406 PATRICK SUPPES

TABLE I
Is visual space Euclidean?

Name Claim Answer

Euclid (300 B.C.) Theory of perspective Yes

Reid (1764), Daniels (1972), Geometry of visibles spherical No
Angell (1974)
Blumenfeld (1913) Parallel alleys not equal No
to equidistance alleys
Luneburg (1947, 1948, Visual space is hyperbolic No
1950)
Blank (1953, 1957, 1958a, Essentially same as Luneburg No
1958b, 1961)
Hardy et al. (1953) Essentially same as Luneburg No
Zajaczkowska (1956) Positive results on experimental No
test of Luneburg theory
Schelling (1956) Hyperbolic relative to given No
fixation point
Gogel (1956a, 1956b, 1963, Equidistance tendency evidence No
1964a, 1964b, 1965) for contextual geometry
Foley (1964, 1965, 1966, Visual space is nonhomogeneous No but
1969, 1972)
Indow (1967, 1968, 1974a, MDS methods yield good Not sure
1974b, 1975) Euclidean fit
Indow et al. (1962a, 1962b, Close to Indow Not sure
1963)
Nishikawa (1967) Close to Indow Not sure
Matsushima and Noguchi (1967) Close to Indow Not sure
Griinbaum (1963) Questions Luneburg theory Yes
Strawson (1966) Phenomenal geometry is Yes
Euclidean

4. and that those things seen within a larger angle appear larger, and those seen within a
smaller angle appear smaller, and those seen within equal angles appear to be of the same
size;
5. and that those things seen within the higher visual range appear higher, while those
within the lower range appear lower;
6. and, similarly, that those seen within the visual range on the right appear on the right,
while those within that on the left appear on the left;
7. but that things seen within several angles appear to be more clear.

( T h e t r a n s l a t i o n is t a k e n f r o m t h a t g i v e n by B u r t o n in 1 9 4 5 . )
T h e d e v e l o p m e n t of E u c l i d ' s Optics is m a t h e m a t i c a l in c h a r a c t e r , b u t it is
n o t a x i o m a t i c in t h e s a m e w a y t h a t t h e E l e m e n t s are. F o r e x a m p l e , l a t e r
 IS VISUAL SPACE EUCLIDEAN? 407

Euclid proves two propositions, 'to know how great is a given elevation
when the sun is shining' and 'to know how great is a given elevation when
the sun is not shining'. As would be expected, there is no serious
introduction of the concept of the sun or of shining but they are treated in
an informal, commonsense, physical way with the essential thing for the
proof being rays from the sun falling upon the end of a line. Visual space is
of course treated by Euclid as Euclidean in character.
The restriction to monocular vision is one that we shall meet repeatedly
in this survey. However, it should be noted that Euclid proves several
propositions involving more than one eye; for example, 'If the distance
between the eyes is greater than the diameter of the sphere, more than the
hemispheres will be seen'. Euclid is not restricted to some simple geomet-
ric optics but is indeed concerned with the theory of vision, as is evident
from the proposition that 'if an arc of a circle is placed on the same plane
as the eye, the arc appears to be a straight line'. This kind of proposition is
a precursor of later theories - for example, that of Thomas Reid - which
emphasize the non-Euclidean character of visual space.
I skip rapidly through the period after Euclid to the eighteenth century,
not because there are not matters of interest in this long intervening
period but because there do not seem to be salient changes of opinion
about the character of visual space, or at least if there are they are not
known to me. I looked, for example, at the recent translation by David C.
Lindberg (1970) of the thirteenth-century treatise Perspectiva Communis
of John Pecham and found nothing to report in the present context,
although the treatise itself and Lindberg's comments on it are full of
interesting matter of great importance concerning other questions in
optics, as, for example, theories about the causes of light.
Newton's Optieks (1704/1931) is in marked contrast to Euclid's. The
initial definitions do not make any mention of the eye until Axiom VIII,
and then in very restrained fashion. Almost without exception, the
propositions of Newton's optics are concerned with geometrical and
especially physical properties of light. Only really in several of the
Queries at the end are there any conjectures about the mechanisms of the
eye, and these conjectures do not bear on the topic at hand.
Five years after the publication of the first edition of Newton's Opticks,
Berkeley's An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709/1901)
appeared in 1709. Berkeley does not really have much of interest to say
408 PATRICK SUPPES

about the geometry of visual space, except in a negative way. He makes

the point that distance cannot be seen directly and, in fact, seems to
categorize the perception of distance as a matter of tactile rather than
visual sensation because the muscular convergence of the eyes is tactile in
character. He emphatically makes the point that we are not able geomet-
rically to observe or compute the optical angle generated by a remote
point as a vertex with sides pointing toward the centers of the two eyes.
Here is what he says about the perception of optical angles. "Since
therefore those angles and lines are not themselves perceived by sight, it
follows . . . . that the mind does not by them judge the distance of objects"
(4~ 13). What he says about distance he also says about magnitude not
being directly perceived visually. In this passage (paragraph 53), he is
especially negative about trying to use the geometry of the visual world as
a basis for visual perception.
It is clear from these and other passages that for Berkeley visual space
is not Euclidean because there is no proper perception of distance or
magnitude; at least, visual space is not a three-dimensional Euclidean
space. What he seems to say is sufficiently ambiguous as to whether one
should argue that it is at least a two-dimensional Euclidean space. My
own inclination is to judge that his views on this are more negative than
positive. Perhaps a sound negative argument can be made up from his
insistence on there being a minimum visible. As he puts it, "It is certain
sensible extension is not infinitely divisible. There is a minimum tangible,
and a minimum visible, beyond which sense cannot perceive. This
everyone's experience will inform him" ( # 54).
In fact, toward the end of the essay, Berkeley makes it clear that even
two-dimensional geometry is not a proper part of visual space or, as we
might say, the visual field. As he says in the final paragraph of the essay,
"By this time, I suppose, it is clear that neither abstract nor visible
extension makes the object of geometry."
Of much greater interest here is Thomas Reid's Inquiry into the Human
Mind, first published in 1764 (1764/1967). Chapter 6 deals with seeing,
and Section 9 is the celebrated one entitled 'Of the geometry of visibles'.
It is sometimes said that this section is a proper precursor of non-
Euclidean geometry, but if so, it must be regarded as an implicit precursor
because the geometry explicitly discussed by Reid as the geometry of
visibles is wholly formulated in terms of spherical geometry, which had of
 IS VISUAL SPACE EUCLIDEAN? 409

course been recognized as a proper part of geometry since ancient times.

The viewpoint of Reid's development is clearly set forth at the beginning
of the section: "Supposing the eye placed in the centre of a sphere, every
great circle of the sphere will have the same appearance to the eye as if it
was a straight line; for the curvature of the circle being turned directly
toward the eye, is not perceived by it. And, for the same reason, any line
which is drawn in the plane of a great circle of the sphere, whether it be in
reality straight or curve, will appear to the eye." It is important to
note that Reid's geometry of visibles is a geometry of monocular vision.
He mentions in other places binocular vision, but the detailed geometri-
cal development is restricted to the geometry of a single eye. The
important contrast between Berkeley and Reid is that Reid develops in
some detail the geometry in a straightforward, informal, mathematical
fashion. No such comparable development occurs in Berkeley.
Daniels (1972) has argued vigorously that Reid's geometry of visibles is
not simply a use of spherical geometry but is an introduction by Reid of a
double elliptic space. A similar argument is made by Angell (1974). I am
sympathetic with these arguments, but it seems to me that they go too far
and for a fairly straightforward reason not discussed by either Daniels or
Angell. Let us recall how elliptic geometry was created by Felix Klein at
the end of the nineteenth century. He recognized that a natural geometry
very similar to Euclidean geometry or hyperbolic geometry could be
obtained from spherical geometry by identifying antipodal points as a
single point. The difficultywith spherical geometry as a geometry having a
development closely parallel to that of Euclidean geometry is that two
great circles, which correspond to lines, have two points, not one point, of
intersection. However, by identifying the two antipodal points as a single
point, a fair number of standard Euclidean postulates remain valid. It is
quite clear that no such identification of antipodal points was made by
Reid, for he says quite clearly in the fifth of his propositions, 'Any two
right lines being produced will meet in two points, and mutually bisect
each other'. This property of meeting in two points rather than one is
what keeps his geometry of visibles from being a proper elliptic geometry
and forces us to continue to think of it in terms of the spherical model used
directly by Reid himself.
In spite of the extensive empirical and theoretical work of Helmholtz
on vision, he does not have a great deal to say that directly bears on this
410 PATRICK SUPPES

question, and I move along to experiments and relevant psychological

theory in the twentieth century. The first stopping point is Blumenfeld
(1913).
Blumenfeld was among the first to perform a specific experiment to
show that, in one sense, phenomenological visual judgments do not
satisfy all Euclidean properties. Blumenfeld performed experiments with
so-called parallel and equidistance alleys. In a darkened room the subject
sits at a table, looking straight ahead, and he is asked to adjust two rows of
point sources of light placed on either side of the normal plane, i.e., the
vertical plane that bisects the horizontal segment joining the centers of
the two eyes. The two furthest lights are fixed and are placed symmetri-
cally and equidistant from the normal plane. The subject is then asked to
arrange the other lights so that they form a parallel alley extending
toward him from the fixed lights. His task is to arrange the lights so that he
perceives them as being straight and parallel to each other in his visual
space. This is the task for construction of a parallel alley. The second task
is to construct a distance alley. In this case, all the lights except the two
fixed lights are turned off and a pair of lights is presented, which are
adjusted as being at the same physical distance apart as the fixed lights -
the kind of equidistance judgments discussed earlier. That pair of lights is
then turned off and another pair of lights closer to him is presented for
adjustment, and so forth. The physical configurations do not coincide, but
in Euclidean geometry straight lines are parallel if and only if they are
equidistant from each other along any mutual perpendiculars. The dis-
crepancies observed in Blumenfeld's experiment are taken to be evidence
that visual space is not Euclidean. In both the parallel-alley and
equidistance-alley judgments the lines diverge as you move away from
the subject, but the angle of divergence tends to be greater in the case of
parallel than in the case of equidistance alleys. The divergence of the
alleys as one moves away from the subject has been taken by Luneburg to
support his hypothesis that visual space is hyperbolic.
In fact, Luneburg, in several publications in the late forties, has been by
far the strongest supporter of the view that visual space is hyperbolic. He,
in conjunction with his collaborators, has set forth a detailed mathemati-
cal theory of binocular vision and at the same time has generated a series
of experimental investigations to test the basic tenets of the theory.
 IS V I S U A L SPACE EUCLIDEAN? 411

In many respects, Luneburg's article (1947) remains the best detailed

mathematical treatment of the theory of binocular vision. Without exten-
sive discussion, Luneburg restricts himself to Riemannian geometries of
constant curvature in order to preserve rigid motions, that is, free
mobility of rigid bodies. Luneburg develops in a coordinate system
natural for binocular vision the theory of Riemannian spaces of constant
curvature in a quite satisfactory form, although an explicit axiomatic
treatment is missing. On the other hand, he nowhere examines with any
care or explicitness the more general and primitive assumptions that lead
to assuming that visual space is a Riemannian space of constant curva-
ture. After these general developments he turns to the detailed argu-
ments for the view that the appropriate space of constant curvature for
visual space is hyperbolic. It is not possible to enter into the details of
Luneburg's argument here, but he bases it on three main lines of
considerations, all of which have had a great deal of attention in the
theory of vision: first, the data arising from the frontal-plane horopter
where curves which appear as straight are physically curved (data on
these phenomena go back to the time before Helmholtz); second, the
kind of alley phenomena concerning judgments of parallelness men-
tioned earlier; and, third, accounting for judgments of distorted rooms in
which appropriate perspective lines are drawn and which consequently
appear as rectangular or regular (here, Luneburg draws on some classic
and spectacular demonstrations by A. Ames, Jr.). One of the difficulties
of this field is that the kind of detailed mathematical and quantitative
arguments presented by Luneburg in connection with these three typical
kinds of problems are not satisfactorily analyzed in the later literature.
Rather, new data of a different sort are presented to show that different
phenomena argue against Luneburg's hypothesis that visual space is
hyperbolic.
Luneburg died in 1949, but a number of his former students and
collaborators have continued his work and provided additional experi-
mental support as well as additional mathematically based arguments in
favor of his views. I refer especially to Blank (1953, 1957, 1958a, 1958b,
1961) and Hardy, Rand, Rittler, Blank, and Boeder (1953), although this
is by no means an exhaustive list. Another positive experimental test was
provided by Zajaczkowska (1956).
412 PATRICK SUPPES

Schelling (1956) basically agrees with Luneburg but makes an impor-

tant point of modification, namely, the metrics of negative curvature -
that is, of the hyperbolic spaces that Luneburg argues for - are essentially
momentary metrics. At a given instant the eye has a certain fixation point,
and relative to this fixation point Luneburg's theory is, according to
Schelling, probably approximately correct, but the applicability of the
theory is severely restricted because the eyes are normally moving about
continuously and the points of fixation are continually changing. This
fundamental fact of change must be taken account of in any fully
adequate theory,
Gogel (1956a, 1956b, 1963, 1964a, 1964b, 1965) has studied what is
called the equidistance tendency, or what in the context of this paper we
might term the Berkeley tendency. Remember that Berkeley held that
distance was not a visual idea at all but derived from the tactile sense.
Without entering into a precise analysis of Berkeley's views, Gogel has
provided an important body of evidence that when other cues are missing
there is a strong tendency to view objects as being at the same distance
from the observer. These careful and meticulous studies of Gogel are
important for establishing not only the equidistance tendency but also its
sensitivity to individual variation, on the one hand, and to the presence of
additional visual cues, on the other. The equidistance tendency is cer-
tainly present as a central effect, but any detailed theory of visual space
has a bewildering complexity of contextual and individual differences to
account for, and it seems to me that Gogel's experiments are essentially
decisive on this point. In the papers referred to, Gogel does not really give
a sharp answer to the question about the character of visual space, but I
have listed him in Table I because it seems to me that the impact of his
studies is to argue strongly for skepticism about fixing the geometry of
visual space very far up in the standard hierarchy and, rather, to insist on
the point that the full geometry is strongly contextual in character and
therefore quite deviant from the classical hierarchy.
A number of interesting experimental studies of the geometry of visual
space have been conducted by John Foley. In Foley (1964) an experiment
using finite configurations of small point sources of light was conducted to
test the Desarguesian property of visual space. (Of course, the property
was tested on the assumption that a number of other axioms were valid
for visual space.) The results confirmed the Desarguesian property for
 IS V I S U A L S P A C E E U C L I D E A N ? 413

most observers but not for all. In Foley (1966), perceived equidistance
was studied as a function of viewing distance. Like most of Foley's
experiments, this was conducted in the horizontal eye-level plane. The
locus of perceived equidistance was determined at distances of 1.2, 2.2,
3.2, and 4.2 meters from the observer. As in other Foley experiments, the
stimuli were small, point-like light sources viewed in complete darkness.
The observer's head was held fixed but his eyes were permitted to move
freely. There were five lights, one in the normal plane, which was fixed,
and two variable lights on each side of the normal plane at angles of 12
degrees and 24 degrees with respect to the normal plane. The locus of
perceived equidistance was found to be concave toward the observer at
all distances. Perhaps most importantly, the locus was found to vary with
viewing distance, which indicates that the visual space does not depend on
the spatial distribution of retinal stimulation alone. Again, there is here a
direct argument for a contextual geometry and results are not consistent
with Luneburg's theory. The equidistance judgments were of the follow-
ing sort: A subject was instructed to set each of the lights, except the fixed
light, in the normal plane to be at the same distance from himself as the
fixed light. Thus, it should appear to him that the lights lie on a circle, with
himself as observer at the center. The important point is that for none of
the ten subjects in the experiment did the judgments of the locus for
equidistance lie on the Vieth-Mueller horopter or circle mentioned
earlier as one of the supporting arguments for Luneburg's theory. Also
important for the fundamental geometry of visual space is the fact that the
loci determined by the observers were not symmetric about the normal
plane.
Foley's (1972) study shows experimentally that, on the one hand, the
size-distance invariance hypothesis is incorrect, and that in fact the ratio
of perceived frontal extent to perceived egocentric distance greatly
exceeds the physical ratio, while, on the other hand, perceived visual
angles are quite close to physical ones. These results, together with other
standard assumptions, are inconsistent with the Luneburg theory that
visual space is hyperbolic. Foley describes the third experiment in this
paper in the following way:
How can it be that in the primary visual space reports of perceived size-distance ratio are not
related to reports of perceived visual angle in a Euclidean way? One possibility is that the
two kinds of judgments are in part the product of different and independent perceptual
414 PATRICK SUPPES

processes . . . . The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the two kinds of j u d g m e n t s
are the product of independent processes. They also show that no one geometrical model
can be appropriate to all stimulus situations, and they suggest that the geometry may
approach Euclidean geometry with the introduction of cues to distance.

Again, there is in Foley's detailed analysis a strong case for a contextual

geometry. A number of other detailed experimental studies of Foley that
have not been referenced here build a case for the same general contex-
tual view, which I discuss in more detail below.
A number of detailed investigations on the geometry of visual space
have been conducted by Tarow Indow (1967, 1968, 1974a, 1974b,
1975) and other Japanese investigators closely associated with him
(Indow et al., 1962a, 1962b, 1963; Matsushima and Noguchi, 1967;
Nishikawa, 1967). They have found, for example, that multidimensional
scaling methods (MDS), which have been intensively developed in
psychology over the past decade and a half, in many cases yield extremely
good fits to Euclidean space. Indow has experimentally tested the
Luneburg theory based upon the kind of alley experiments that go back to
Blumenfeld (1913). As might be expected, he duplicates the result that
the equidistance alleys always lie outside the parallel alleys, which under
the other assumptions that are standard implies that the curvature of the
space is negative and therefore it must be hyperbolic. But Indow (1974)
properly challenges the simplicity of the Luneburg assumptions, espe-
cially the constancy of curvature. It is in this context that he has also tried
the alternative approach of determining how well multidimensional
scaling will work to fit a Euclidean metric. As he emphasizes also, the
Luneburg approach is fundamentally based upon differential geometry as
a method of characterizing Riemannian spaces with constant curvature,
but for visual judgments it is probably more appropriate to depend upon
the judgments in the large and therefore upon a different conceptual basis
for visual geometry. Throughout his writings, Indow recognizes the
complexity and difficulty of reaching for any simple answer to give the
proper characterization of visual space. The wealth of detail in his articles
and those of his collaborators is commended to the reader who wants to
pursue these matters in greater depth.
In his important book on the philosophy of space and time, Grfinbaum
(1963) rejects the Luneburg theory and affirms that, in order to yield the
right kinds of perceptual judgments, visual space must be Euclidean. His
 IS V I S U A L SPACE EUCLIDEAN? 415

argument is rather brief and I shall not examine it in any detail. It would
be my own view that he has not given proper weight to the detailed
experimental studies or to the details of the various theoretical proposals
that have been made.
I close this survey by returning to a philosophical response to the
question, that of Strawson (1966) in his book on Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason. From the standpoint of the large psychological literature I have
surveyed, it is astounding to find Strawson asserting as a necessary
proposition that phenomenal geometry is Euclidean. The following
quotation states the matter bluntly:
With certain reservations and qualifications, to be considered later, it seems that Euclidean
geometry may also be interpreted as a body of unfalsifiable propositions about phenomenal
straight lines, triangles, circles, etc.; as a body of a priori propositions about spatial
appearances of these kinds and hence, of course, as a theory whose application is restricted
to such appearances. (p. 286)

The astounding feature of Strawson's view is the absence of any consider-

ation that phenomenal geometry could be other than Euclidean and that
it surely must be a matter, one way or another, of empirical investigation
to determine what is the case. The qualifications he gives later do not bear
on this matter but pertain rather to questions of idealization and of the
nature of constructions, etc. The absence of any attempt to deal in any
fashion whatsoever with the large theoretical and experimental literature
on the nature of visual space is hard to understand.

IV. S O M E REMARKS ON THE ISSUES

In this final section, I center my remarks around three clusters of issues.

The first is concerned with the contextual character of visual geometry,
the second with problems of distance perception and motion, and the
third with the problem of characterizing the nature of the objects of visual
space.
A. Contextual Geometry
A wide variety of experiments and ordinary experience as well testify to
the highly contextual character of visual space. The presence or absence
of 'extraneous' points can sharply affect perceptual judgments. The
whole range of visual illusions, which I have not discussed here, provides
a broad body of evidence for the surprising strength of these contextual
effects.
416 PATRICK SUPPES

As far as I can tell, no one has tried seriously to take account of these
contextual effects from the standpoint of the axiomatic foundations of
visual geometry. In a way it is not surprising, for the implications for the
axiomatic foundations are, from the ordinary standpoint, horrendous.
Let us take a simple example to illustrate the point.
In ordinary Euclidean geometry, three points form an isosceles triangle
just when two sides of the triangle are of the same length. Suppose now
that Euclidean geometry had the much more complicated aspect that
whether a triangle were isosceles or not depended not simply on the
configuration of the three points but also on whether there was a
distinguished point lying just outside the triangle alongside one of the
equal sides. This asymmetry may well make the visual triangle no longer
isosceles. This is but one simple instance of a combinatorial nightmare of
contextual effects that can easily be imagined and, without much imagina-
tion or experimental skill, verified as being real effects.
What are we to say about such effects? It seems to me the most
important thing is to recognize that perceptual geometry is not really the
same as classical geometry at all, but in terms of the kinds of judgments
we are making it is much closer to physics. Consider, for example, the
corresponding situation with bodies that attract each other by gravitation.
The introduction of a third body makes all the difference to the motions of
the two original bodies and it would be considered bizarre for the
situation to be otherwise. This also applies to electromagnetic forces,
mechanical forces of impact, etc. Contextual effects are the order of the
day in physics, and the relevant physical theories are built to take account
of such effects.
Note that physical theories depend upon distinguished objects located
in particular places in space and time. Space-time itself is a continuum of
undistinguished points, and it is characteristic of the axiomatic founda-
tions of classical geometry that there are no distinguished points in the
space. But it is just a feature of perception that we are always dealing with
distinguished points which are analogous to physical objects, not geomet-
rical points. Given this viewpoint, we are as free to say that we have
contextual effects in visual geometry as we are to make a similar claim in
general relativity due to the presence of large masses in a given region.
Interestingly enough, there is some evidence that as we increase the
visual cues, that is, we fill up the visual field with an increasingly complex
 IS V I S U A L SPACE EUCLIDEAN? 417

context of visual imagery, the visual space becomes more and more
Euclidean. It is possible that we have here the exact opposite of the
situation that exists in general relativity. In the case of perception it may
be that spaces consisting of a very small number of visible points may be
easily made to deviate from any standard geometry.
The geometric viewpoint can be brought into close alignment with the
physical one, when the embedding of finite sets of points in some standard
geometry is taken as the ~ppropriate analysis of the nature of visual space.
This approach was mentioned earlier and is implicit in some of the
experimental literature discussed. It has not sufficiently been brought to
the surface, and the full range of qualitative axioms that must be satisfied
for the embedding of a finite collection of points in a unique way in a given
space, whether Euclidean, hyperbolic, elliptic, or what not, needs more
explicit and detailed attention.
It also seems satisfactory to avoid the problems of contextual effects in
initial study of this kind by deliberately introducing symmetries and also
certain special additional assumptions such as quite special relations of a
fixed kind to the observer. The many different experimental studies and
the kind of mathematical analysis that has arisen out of the Luneburg
tradition suggest that a good many positive and almost definitive results
could be achieved under special restrictive assumptions. It seems to me
that making these results as definitive as possible, admitting at the same
time their specialized character and accepting the fact that the general
situation is contextual in character, is an appropriate research strategy.
It also seems to me likely that for these special situations one can give a
definitely negative answer to the question, Is visual space Euclidean?, and
respond that, to high approximations, in many special situations it is
hyperbolic and possibly in certain others elliptic in character. This
restricted answer is certainly negative. A general answer at the present
time does not seem available as to how to characterize the geometry in a
l!ully satisfactory way that takes account of the contextual effects that are
characteristic of visual illusions, equidistance tendencies, etc.

B. Distance Perception and Motion

As indicated earlier in the brief discussion of the Helmholtz-Lie problem,
most of the work surveyed in the preceding section has not taken
418 PATRICK SUPPES

sufficient account of problems of motion. There is an excellent survey

article of Foley (in press) on distance perception which indicates that eye
motion during the initial stage of focusing on an object is especially
critical in obtaining information about perceptual distance. In spite of the
views of Berkeley, philosophical traditions in perception have tended to
ignore the complicated problems of motion of the eyes or head as an
integral part of visual perception, but the most elementary considerations
are sufficient to demonstrate their fundamental importance. It was a
fundamental insight of Luneburg to recognize that it is important to
characterize invariance properties of motions of the eyes and head that
compensate each other. The deeper aspects of scanning as determining
the character of the visual field have not really been studied in a
thoroughly mathematical and quantitative fashion, and there is little
doubt in my mind that this is the area most important for future
developments in the theory of visual perception. We should, I would
assume, end up with a kinematics of visual perception replacing the
geometry of visual perception. For example, Lamb (1919) proves that
under Donders' law, which asserts that the position of the eyeball is
completely determined by the primary position and the visual axis aligned
to the fixation point, it is not possible for every physically straight line
segment to be seen as straight. This kinematical theorem of Lamb's,
which is set forth in detail in Roberts and Suppes (1967), provides a
strong kinematical argument against the Euclidean character of visual
space. I cite it here simply as an example of the kind of results that one
should expect to obtain in a more thoroughly developed kinematics of
visual perception.

C. Objectsof VisualSpace
Throughout the analysis given in this paper the exact characterization of
What are to be considered as the objects of visual space has not been
settled in any precise or definitive way. This ambiguity has been deliber-
ate because the wide range of literature to which I have referred does not
have any settled account of what are to be regarded as the objects of
visual space. The range of views is extreme - from Berkeley, who scarcely
even wants to admit a geometry of pure visual space, to those who hold
that visual space is simply a standard Euclidean space and there is little
 IS VISUAL SPACE EUCLIDEAN? 419

real distinction between visual objects and physical objects. In building

up the subject axiomatically and systematically, clearly some commit-
ments are needed, and yet it seems that one can have an intelligible
discussion of the range of literature considered here without having to fix
upon a precise characterization, because there is broad agreement on the
look of things in the field of vision. From the standpoint of the geometry
of visual space, we can even permit such wide disagreement as to whether
the objects are two dimensional or three dimensional in order to discuss
the character of the geometry. Thomas Reid would lean strongly toward
the two-dimensional character of visual space. Foley would hold that
visual space is three dimensional; note, however, that most of his experi-
ments have been restricted to two dimensions. At the very least, under
several different natural characterizations of the objects of visual space it
is apparent that strong claims can be made that visual space is not
Euclidean, and this is a conclusion of some philosophical interest.

Stanford University

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