A satisfactory theory of perception must meet a variety of metaphysical and epistemological demands. What is wanted is a view that simultaneously accounts for, among other things, the epistemic significance of experience, the nature and status of illusion and hallucination, the possibility of unmediated perceptual contact with the world, the "richness" of experience, and the source of perceptual concepts. It has been argued that experience must be conceptual in order to secure the justificatory role of perceptual states; at the same time, it has been thought that such states cannot be conceptual given their phenomenological and explanatory features. Our aim is to introduce and defend a new framework for conceptualism that, by marking ontological and epistemic differences between sensory awareness and perceptual experience, promises to resolve this dispute while accounting for all of the above phenomena.In §1, we clarify the conceptualist thesis at issue. In §2, we present and motivate the framework-a collection of theses about awareness and experience-and defend it against possible objections. In §3, we show how the framework can be used to block what we take to be the most serious threat to conceptualism: the argument from nonveridical experience. In §4, we show how the framework bears upon various further issues that arise in the debates between conceptualists and nonconceptualists, including the C 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 167 168 NOÛS mental lives of simple-minded creatures, constraints on demonstrative concept possession, and the relation between concepts and phenomenology.

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Many of those who accept the universalist thesis that mereological composition is unrestricted also maintain that the folk typically restrict their quantifiers in such a way as to exclude strange fusions when they say things that appear to conflict with universalism. Despite its prima facie implausibility, there are powerful arguments for universalism. By contrast, there is remarkably little evidence for the thesis that strange fusions are excluded from the ordinary domain of quantification. Furthermore, this reconciliatory strategy seems hopeless when applied to the more fundamental conflict between universalism and the intuitions that tell against it.

win earths are counterfactual near-duplicates of earth. Externalism about mental content has come to be widely accepted on the basis of intuitions about twin earths. But there is one sort of twin earth, "dry earth," that has been invoked in several arguments against externalism. Dry earth seems to its inhabitants (our intrinsic duplicates) just as earth seems to us, that is, it seems to them as though there are rivers and lakes and a clear, odorless liquid flowing from their faucets. But, in fact, this is an illusion; there is no such liquid anywhere on the planet. 1 There are a number of related objections to externalism concerning the nature of the concept that is expressed by the word 'water' in the mouths of the inhabitants of dry earth. I intend to answer two of them. The first, raised by Gabriel Segal, concerns the application conditions of this concept. The second, raised by Paul Boghossian, concerns the complexity of the concept. 2 Externalism, as it is to be understood in what follows, is the thesis that (E1) for all natural kinds K, it is metaphysically impossible that K have instances that differ from actual instances of K with respect to their basic physical constitution, and (E2) one cannot possess naturalkind concepts or refer to natural kinds without having had causal interaction with instances of the relevant natural kind. A natural kind is to be understood throughout as a kind all of whose actual instances share a distinctive basic physical constitution.