I criticize recent nonconceptualist readings of Kant's account of perception on the grounds that the strategy of the Deduction requires that understanding be involved in the synthesis of imagination responsible for the intentionality of perceptual experience. I offer an interpretation of the role of understanding in perceptual experience as the consciousness of normativity in the association of one's representations. This leads to a reading of Kant which is conceptualist, but in a way which accommodates considerations favoring nonconceptualism, in particular the primitive character of perceptual experience relative to thought and judgment.

In his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language 1 , Saul Kripke develops a skeptical argument against the possibility of meaning. Suppose that all your previous uses of the word 'plus' and of the '+' sign have involved numbers less than 57. You are now asked 'what is 68 plus 57? and you answer '125.' But a skeptic proposes the hypothesis that by the word 'plus,' or the '+' sign, you previously meant, not addition, but quaddition, where x quus y is the sum of x and y if x and y are less than 57, and otherwise 5. If you are to use the word 'plus' as you used it in the past, the skeptic says, then, on the hypothesis that you meant quaddition, you ought to answer '5.' Against your insistence that you know what you meant by 'plus,' the skeptic challenges you to cite some fact in virtue of which you meant addition. All your previous answers, he points out, were consistent with the hypothesis that you meant quaddition, so how can you justify your claim that you meant addition instead? The upshot of the skeptical considerations is not merely the epistemological conclusion that you do not know what you meant, but the metaphysical conclusion that there is no fact about what you meant. And this conclusion generalizes to all supposed cases of meaning or rule-following, present as well as past. There can be no fact as to whether anyone means anything by any word, or is following any one rule rather than any other. Kripke's argument proceeds mostly by elimination: he considers, and rules out, various proposals as to what the fact of meaning addition might consist in. Two in particular are worth highlighting. The one which Kripke discusses in more detail is that your meaning addition by the word 'plus' is a fact about your dispositions with respect to that word. You meant addition in the past because you were disposed to give the sum rather than the quum in answer to questions using the word 'plus.' Kripke raises three objections against this proposal, turning respectively on the supposed finiteness of our dispositions (26-27), on the fact that we are sometimes disposed to make arithmetical mistakes (28-32), and most importantly on the proposal's apparent failure to account for what he calls the 'normativity of meaning': that one is or was disposed to respond in a certain way on a given occasion cannot make it the case that one ought so to respond (23-24, 37). 2 The other, which Kripke

Davidson claims that nothing can count as a reason for a belief except another belief. This claim is challenged by McDowell, who holds that perceptual experiences can count as reasons for beliefs. I argue that McDowell fails to take account of a distinction between two different senses in which something can count as a reason for belief. While a non‐doxastic experience can count as a reason for belief in one of the two senses, this is not the sense which is presupposed in Davidson's claim. While 1 focus on McDowell's view, the argument generalizes to other views which take experiences as reasons for belief.

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