 As Reid (Intellectual Powers, 1785: Essay 2, ch. 14) was to point out, if we take “seems” here to refer to an appearance of the table itself, then there is no contradiction: appearances of a thing can vary even if the thing does not. But we should treat “seems” as an instance of what Chisholm (1957: 43–44) calls its “epistemic” use. To say that a thing seems to diminish in size is to endorse that it does diminish in size. Accordingly, the phenomenal size reveals the actual size of the object of perception, and that object gets smaller. Hence, we may formulate the argument as: