Giorgio Mazzullo

Psychological or mental trauma is a prominent and widely debated topic within contemporary psychology. Philosophers have also shown increasing interest in psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. However, their attention has often been limited to specific aspects of trauma, leaving the broader question of what psychological trauma is—its metaphysical nature—largely unexplored. This paper aims to address that gap by laying the conceptual groundwork for a metaphysical investigation of psychological trauma. Rather than attempting to resolve the issue outright, the paper seeks to clarify key conceptual foundations, to map the logical space for theorizing about trauma’s metaphysical status, and to offer some initial challenges that any theory of trauma’s nature must confront.

Naïve Realism has become increasingly popular as a theory about veridical perceptions. At the heart of this view is the idea that conscious perceptions are relational events, in which mind-independent aspects of the environment are actual constituents of the experience. Despite its growing popularity, several aspects of the naïve realist proposal regarding the nature of veridical perception and its phenomenal character remain unclear. Naïve Realists sometimes disagree on some of their central claims or have yet to fully articulate their commitments on key aspects of the view. In this paper, I aim to contribute to identifying the most representative version of Naïve Realism, which may serve as a point of reference for future discussions: Standard Naïve Realism. To this end, I consider how leading proponents of Naïve Realism typically frame their view on crucial issues, such as the scope of the naïve realist claims regarding visual consciousness, and the idea that the phenomenal character of veridical perceptions is determined by aspects of the mind-independent environment. I conclude by addressing a challenge to the version of Naïve Realism discussed in the paper.

The Master Argument from Hallucination is one of the most discussed challenges to Naïve Realism. Naïve Realists have thoroughly scrutinised a number of strategies for resisting it. However, they have generally dismissed out of hand what I call the Monist Strategy, according to which the hallucinations invoked by the argument also consist of a relation of perceptual awareness with the mind-independent environment. In this paper, I consider whether this often-implicit dismissal is justified. I suggest that the core of resistance plausibly lies in an assumption regarding the causal requirements for the obtaining of the relation of perceptual awareness invoked by Naïve Realists. Drawing on the existing literature (Raleigh, 2014; Ali, 2018), I consider and elaborate ways in which the Monist Strategy might be developed consistently with this assumption. I suggest that there are indeed reasons to question the viability of this project. However, I argue that it is not entirely clear why Naïve Realists are forced to buy into this assumption. If they were willing to reject it, I contend, a compelling version of the Monist Strategy could be developed. According to such a view, at least some hallucinations are episodes of perceptual awareness of regions of space.

In this paper, we consider strategies for Naïve Realists to resist recent arguments from seeming against their view (Brogaard 2018). First, we critically assess an argument to the effect that seemings are representational. Then, we consider various arguments attempting to establish the falsity of Naïve Realism drawing on the alleged representational properties of seemings. We suggest that Naïve Realists have several options to resist the ways in which their premises are defended. We conclude with a significant result for the existing dispute: seemings might be essentially representational and be part of the nature of visual experiences, and yet this might have limited to no import when it comes to the issue of whether veridical perceptions have a naïve realist nature.