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