 is more to the point. However, here too there are various ways of responding on behalf of EM. Consider counterexample (i)—say, two words made up of the same letters, as in ‘else’ and ‘seel’. If these are taken as word-types, a lot depends on how exactly one construes such things mereologically, and one might simply dismiss the challenge by rejecting, or improving on, the dime-store thought that word-types are letter-type composites (see above ad (14)). Indeed, if they were, then word-types would not only violate extensionality, hence the Strong Supplementation principle (P.5); they would violate the basic Supplementation principle (P.4), since ‘seel’ (for instance) would contain a proper part (the string ‘ee’) that consists of a single proper part (the letter ‘e’). On the other hand, if the items in question are taken as word-tokens, then presumably they are made up of distinct letter-tokens, so again there is no violation of (29), hence no reason to reject (P.5) on these grounds. Of course, we may suppose that one of the two word-tokens is obtained from the other by rearranging the same letter-tokens. If so, however, the issue becomes once again one of diachronic non-identity, with all that it entails, and it is not obvious that we have a counterexample to (29). (See Lewis 1991: 78f.) What if our letter-tokens are suitably arranged so as to form both words at the same time? For example, suppose they are arranged in a circle (Simons 1987: 114). In this case one might be inclined to say that we have a genuine counterexample. But one may equally well insist that we have got just one circular inscription that, curiously, can be read as two different words depending on where we start. Compare: I draw a rabbit that to you looks like a duck. Have I thereby made two drawings? I write ‘p’ on my office glass door; from the outside you read ‘q’. Have I therefore produced two letter-tokens? And what if Mary joins you and reads it upside down; have I also written the letter ‘b’? Surely then I have also written the letter ‘d’, as my upside-down office mate John points out. This multiplication of entities seems preposterous. There is just one thing there, one inscription, and what it looks (or mean) to you or me or Mary or John is irrelevant to what that thing is. Similarly—it may be argued—there is just one inscription in our example, a circular display of four letter-tokens, and whether we read it as an ‘else’-inscription or a ‘seel’-inscription is irrelevant to its mereological structure. (Varzi 2008)