 The first question to be answered is, what, in addition to the contents of our representations, grounds the existence of empirical objects? The natural answer, for the qualified phenomenalist, is that there must be things in themselves that appear as these objects. Kant repeatedly insists that it is a conceptual truth that appearances are appearances of something that is not itself an appearance, a thing in itself (e.g., A251–2, Bxxvi–xxvii, B306, B307, and Ak. 4:314–5). On the qualified phenomenalist reading, this means that the existence of an appearance requires (a) a representation of an object, and (b) a thing in itself that appears as that object. A fully developed qualified phenomenalist reading would require saying precisely what it means for a thing in itself to appear as an empirical object (an object of experience), but for reasons of space only a sketch of an answer can be given here. At the minimum, the qualified phenomenalist should require that the thing in itself causally affect the experiencing subject, and that the sensory content thus produced be involved in the experience of the object. Some scholars have suggested that the properties of appearances are structurally isomorphic to the properties of things in themselves, but I will not further pursue that idea here (e.g., Findlay 1981: 92–93; see also Van Cleve 1999: 155–162).