Susanne Langer and insight

It is thought that the chapter on "insight" in The Practice of Philosphy influenced Bernard Lonergan.

There is a curiousity in the chapter: she seems to suggest that a map in a plane is a better approximation to the earth than a spherical orange.

Perhaps not so if the skin of a large orange were proportional to its radius as is the earth's crust to its radius.  Not if the orange is at a distance from some giant balloon with sizes and distances proportional to those of sun and earth.  Not if peeled to show lines of longitude. Not if peeled and that peel retrieved and used to suggest techtonic plates. Not if squashed slightly and set an angle of some 24 degrees upon a circle on a large table top with a flashlight at the center of that plane.

And what if the proportions were quite wrong?  Could not an astronomer in Spain have held up an orange?

The sextant, the orange and the map.  A man at sea.