The 'two-level approach' is an informal name for Bierwisch's programme for the study of word and sentence meaning. The term alludes to a proposed distinction between a "linguistic-semantic" level of meaning and an essentialy non-linguistic, "conceptual" level, at which semantic representation are interpreted, relative to conceptual knowledge. After a brief presentation of the approach, a number of critical issues are raised. The paper focuses especially on two of these : the distinction between "semantics" and "conceptualisation"; and the thesis that lexical semantic knowledge involves maximally general representations of word meanings.