Metasemantics is a relatively recent philosophical project. Therefore, there are a number of competing approaches to the investigation of the philosophical nature of the study of meaning. In this chapter, I narrow the focus to the foundations of the scientific study of semantics, not the broader philosophical or metaphysical programme often associated with the philosophy of language. The philosophical foundations project allows for a priori metaphysical considerations to trump naturalistic inquiry. The metascientific project, on the other hand, investigates the formal apparatus, mathematics, and scientific structures of semantics as a science. I argue for the latter interpretation over the former. After establishing the remit of the investigation, the principle of compositionality and the general methodology of formal model-theoretic semantics is explored. Next, the role of context is explained and used as a tool to establish a continuum from formal semantics through dynamic approaches to computational distributional semantics. This is just one lens through which to appreciate often overlooked commonalities between disparate theories. Lastly, formal semantic machinery is extended in a number of directions, from lexical semantics to the burgeoning field of supersemantics. The formal finds complex compositional structure below the word and the latter applies it to phenomena beyond language.

I read Kripke’s sketches of our ordinary view of meaning in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language as attempts to highlight the features of meaning that enable us to draw the distinction between what seems right and what is right. I argue that Kripke thinks the best way to clarify these features of meaning is to describe metasemantic conditions that a speaker’s words must satisfy if the speaker is to be warranted in asserting a sentence in which the words occur. Although the view of meaning I attribute to Kripke is initially compelling, I argue that it rests on a subtle yet fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between what seems right and what is right.

This final brief stage of the journey invites reflection on the various seminal, ground-breaking ideas and approaches introduced in this journey and on how they can be woven into a ‘postively eclectic’ view of what meaning in language is – a unique view that each reader can develop for themselves with the help of this introduction to ideas and to ways of thinking. It also addresses the role of metasemantics and metapragmatics in posing ‘foundational questions’ about meaning. It concludes with a dicussion of the future of meaning, in the context of some ‘big questions’: constraints on processing information imposed by the human brain, the intelligence–consciousness interface, and, generally, how to comprehend the human take on the world – the human way of comprehending it and organizing and conveying information. In short, it puts the theories and approaches discussed in this journey under the net of our human meaning.

The goal of this paper is to discuss which basic semantic entities we should include in our formal semantic ontology, and on which principles we should include them (cf. Bach 1986b). The vast majority of formal theories employ individuals as a basic type; they represent quantification over, modification of, and reference to individuals. But many theories include additional types or entities, including possible worlds, but also less common ones like vectors. Some papers have argued that types should be constrained or reduced; others that they should be proliferated. I present some representative arguments on both sides and suggest a path forward in evaluating them against one another.

This chapter draws on independent work on the syntax–semantics interface to motivate a more complex clausal architecture for an assignment-variable-based theory. Binding across syntactic categories and semantic domains is captured uniformly from a generalized binder-index feature, which attaches directly to expressions undergoing movement for type reasons. World-binding (intensionality) arises from the complementizer, which moves from the world-argument position of the clause’s main predicate; assignment-binding arises from modal elements, which move from an internal assignment-argument position of the complementizer. The semantics is fully compositional. The remainder of the book develops the account and applies it to a range of constructions and types of linguistic shifting phenomena.