Daniel Kalpokas, Perception and Its Content: Toward the Propositional Attitude View, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2024, 162 pp.

548 RESEÑAS DOI: 10.36446/af.e1233 Daniel Kalpokas, Perception and Its Content: Toward the Propositional Attitude View, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2024, 162 pp. What is the nature of perceptual experience? How does it relate to our knowledge about the world? And how does it enable the very possibility of empirical thought? During the past decades, these questions have been at the center of a debate that connects philosophy of perception and epistemology. However, as years went by and the positions on offer exchanged their respective arguments, many considered an unsavory stalemate to be reached. Daniel Kalpokas’ Perception and Its Content: Toward the Propositional Attitude View could be the book that brings an end to such stalemate. While taking explicit inspiration from McDowell (1996, 2009), Kalpokas breaks away from tradition by offering an original and refreshing perspective on the nature of perception. His main objective is to propose a characterization of perceptual experience that can fulfill three interconnected objectives: explain the epistemic role usually granted to perceptual experience as the ultimate “tribunal” for the justification of empirical thoughts, accommodate the phenomenological characteristics that define perceptual experiences, and elucidate the transcendental conditions for empirical content itself. The book is structured in three parts, prefaced by a brief introduction explaining the lingering relevance of Sellar’s “Myth of the Given”. The first part comprises chapters 1 and 2, and centers around the question of whether perceptual experience has content or not. In it, two types of positions that reject perceptual content are considered, the “causal-linkage view” and the “relational view”, and found inadequate on both phenomenological and epistemological grounds. Having established that perceptual experience has content, the second part of the book (comprised of chapters 3, 4 and 5) centers around the question of how perceptual content should be understood. This leads Kalpokas to consider and argue against both traditional nonconceptualism and conceptualism, and to offer and defend his own view: perception is a propositional attitude, and its content is partly conceptual and partly world dependent. Finally, the third part of the book is composed of chapters 6 and 7 and is dedicated to explaining in further detail how Kalpokas’ position can accommodate the epistemological role of experience and the transcendental conditions for empirical thought. Chapter 1 is dedicated to the positions, particularly those belonging to the “post-sellarasian” tradition (e.g. Rorty, Davidson, Brandom), that understand perceptual experience only in terms of some form of causal ANÁLISIS FILOSÓFICO 45(2) - pISSN 0326-1301 - eISSN 1851-9636 - CC: BY-NC - (noviembre 2025) 548-553 RESEÑAS 549 linkage. These positions deny that perceptual experience has any epistemic role per-se, and instead hold that perception merely causes epistemicrelevant states, like beliefs. However, Kalpokas argues, this strategy would be unable to explain how or why the content of those beliefs would actually reflect true facts about the perceived world (i.e. grant epistemic access to the world). Moreover, insofar as causal relations are extensionally defined, these positions seem unable to explain the “aspectual” component of phenomenological experience and its contribution to belief formation. So, for example, these positions would be ill fitted to explain how a single reversible figure like the duck/rabbit could be seen as either a duck or a rabbit, and how each of those experiences could lead to the formation of different beliefs. These considerations, among others, lead Kalpokas to consider that the causal linkage theories fail to account for the nature of perceptual experience on both epistemological and phenomenological grounds. Chapter 2 analyses in depth the position commonly known as “naïve realism”. According to this view, we do not represent the objects that affect our senses. Instead, we are immediately aware or, in Russellian terms, “acquainted” with them. As with the causal linkage theories, the underlying idea with naïve realism is that positing perceptual content amounts to introducing an unnecessary epistemic intermediary between belief and the world. However, here again Kalpokas finds both epistemological and phenomenological issues. Firstly, naïve realism seems to plunge directly into Sellar’s Myth of the Given, despite not being its original target. That is because an object (i.e. a physical entity) simply isn’t the kind of thing that can count as a reason to believe in something, in so far as it lacks any kind of predicative structure to state matters of fact. Therefore, if naïve realists want to capture the epistemic role of perception, they seem forced to either include a predicative aspect in perceptual experience (i.e. include content) or hold that non-epistemic elements are fulfilling epistemic roles (i.e. adopt the Myth of the Given). Phenomenologically, naïve realism also seems incapable of accommodating the aspectual component of perceptual experience, insofar as this component isn’t defined only by the extensional object being perceived. Therefore, Kalpokas concludes that naïve realism is an inappropriate characterization of perception. Chapter 3 centers around different versions of non-conceptualism. According to these positions, perceptual experiences have contents that represent the world as being in some particular way, even though the perceiving subject doesn’t need to have the concepts required to specify such content. Here, Kalpokas is interested in three versions of nonconceptualism, all of which grant some sort of epistemic relevance to the non-conceptual contents of experience: Heck’s (2000) informational ANÁLISIS FILOSÓFICO 45(2) - (noviembre 2025) 550 RESEÑAS content, Peacocke’s (1992) protopropositional and scenario content, and Hanna’s (2011) essentially non-conceptual content. Kalpokas main line of objection is that, for perceptual experiences to count as reasons for holding beliefs, the perceiving subject must be able to incorporate their contents into her cognitive life. However, if the perceiving subject lacks the relevant concepts to understand what is being nonconceptually represented, then it becomes implausible to claim that she could incorporate such contents into her cognitive life. Therefore, nonconceptualism seems to fall into the following contradiction: the subject’s own perceptual reasons for holding her beliefs would be unintelligible for her (something that, as Kalpokas is quick to point out, constitutes another version of the Myth of the Given). Chapter 4 is dedicated to the propositional attitude view (PAV) and could be divided into two parts: one dedicated to clarifying this view, and one dedicated to arguing in its favor. According to PAV, perceptual experience has propositional content and is, therefore, a propositional (...truncated)