that we are regarding a visible region of unbounded high curvature as a violation of censorship, even if this visible region does not contain an actual singularity.

The examples of naked singularities known in spherical collapse arise for various forms of matter. This includes dust, perfect fluids, imperfect fluids and scalar fields. There are also some general arguments suggesting the occurrence of naked singularities for any form of matter satisfying the weak energy condition (e.g. an existence proof, and the behaviour of null geodesic expansion). None of this, taken by itself, constitutes a proof. But, taken together, these arguments strongly suggest that visible regions of unbounded curvature arise generically in spherical gravitational collapse. Also, black holes arise generically in spherical collapse.

Now, we know from the singularity theorems that the occurrence of singularities in spherical collapse is stable against the introduction of non-spherical perturbations. In view of this, it is very hard to see why the naked singularities arising in spherical collapse should be unstable against non-spherical perturbations, whereas the black holes forming in spherical collapse should be stable against such perturbations.

It is only fair to say that different people have drawn widely different conclusions about cosmic censorship from 