NU graduate and advanced undergraduate core course (latest Fall 2016): Human languages pair 'sounds' with 'meanings'. But what are 'meanings'? We approach this difficult question by focusing on what speakers know about how meaning is expressed in language. Of primary interest is the traditional model that characterizes semantic competence in terms of knowledge of compositional truth conditions. Here, we pay close attention to which aspects of speakers' knowledge that this model captures well, and those that it has more difficulty with. Along the way, we probe different types of meaning 'indeterminacy', and the distinctions between: semantics and pragmatics, sense and reference, and meaning and truth. A good deal of the course is geared towards developing proficiency with the mathematical and logical tools used in formal semantics.