Note that the major relevant historical disagreement is not over any of these ideas, but over what the true territory is. Most medieval maps (pre-1300) were deliberately warped not to represent their territory as it looked in the physical world, but to show “spiritual truths”. Jerusalem would be at the center, each city’s size would be proportional to its importance in God’s plan, and distances and directions would be warped to make a particular set of points draw the figure of a cross on the map. Similarly, maps of medieval cities would not show the city to scale, but would plant the richest part of the city in the center of the map, occupying a large fraction of the map, regardless of its actual physical location or size. Judging from the theories of perception and reality then in circulation, the people making (or at least the people buying) these maps probably thought they were not distorting, but correcting the distortions of the senses and presenting a view that would actually lead to more correct beliefs.
Note that the major relevant historical disagreement is not over any of these ideas, but over what the true territory is. Most medieval maps (pre-1300) were deliberately warped not to represent their territory as it looked in the physical world, but to show “spiritual truths”. Jerusalem would be at the center, each city’s size would be proportional to its importance in God’s plan, and distances and directions would be warped to make a particular set of points draw the figure of a cross on the map. Similarly, maps of medieval cities would not show the city to scale, but would plant the richest part of the city in the center of the map, occupying a large fraction of the map, regardless of its actual physical location or size. Judging from the theories of perception and reality then in circulation, the people making (or at least the people buying) these maps probably thought they were not distorting, but correcting the distortions of the senses and presenting a view that would actually lead to more correct beliefs.