How did Protagoras use the experience of cold to explain differences in perception?

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Detail from School of Athens by Raphael — Sophist Plato (center left) and Aristotle, detail from *School of Athens*, fresco by Raphael, 1508–11; in the Stanza della Segnatura, the Vatican. Plato is shown pointing to the heavens and the realm of forms, Aristotle to the earth and the realm of things.

Protagoras, the most famous of the Sophists, used the example of cold to illustrate his famous dictum that "man is the measure of all things." By this, he meant that for human beings, the world is defined by how it appears to them individually rather than by some objective, independent reality.12

Protagoras argued that it is illogical to tell a person who is shivering with cold that it is actually warm. Because the individual perceives the cold and experiences it physically, the cold is real for them—it exists and is present in their experience. This illustration serves to demonstrate his broader philosophical stance on relativism: since perceptions vary between individuals, the world as it is experienced is relative to the person perceiving it.123