Experiences of derealization A naive realist account
Philosophical Psychology December 19, 2025 Craig French
Derealization, a symptom of Derealization/Depersonalization Disorder, involves a sense of unreality about one's surroundings despite still perceiving them. This presents a challenge for naive realist theories of perception, which hold that real external objects centrally explain the phenomenology of perception. The author develops this into a new problem for naive realism: the problem of derealization. The naive realist can respond, the author argues, by proposing that perceptual experiences of derealization involve existentially degraded perceptual relations to external objects, where perception makes an object available without its existence. Such degradation occurs when perception is structured by background feelings of unreality.