Like a fish

Imagine a wall surrounding a village and the only way to see through it is a pipe. When you look through the pipe you see objects on the other side. The question is how far away are the objects? There are two schools of thought in the village. One group measures how big the objects appear and compare them with the similar objects in the village and say the objects are thus and so distance away.  The other group has a document they claim is from the builder of the tube which says the objects are much closer than the other group because there are "lenses" in the tube which distorts the sizes of the objects. The other group says this is poppycock because nobody can see the lenses and no one even believes the document is real any more. It was just made up. There is another group which believes the document is real and the builder of the wall wrote it, but think the lenses are metaphors which don't really distort the image. While claiming to hold the document and the builder i