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The Future of Semantics? Martin Stokhof∗ th January  The paper by Fritz Hamm, Hans Kamp and Michiel van Lambalgen (in what follows abbreviated as ‘’) is a very rich one. Not only does it contain a wealth of empirical and formal insights concerning the analysis of tense and aspect, planning and causality, and other phenomena, it also contains some penetrating remarks concerning the scope and method of semantic theory. It is the latter aspect of the paper that I want to make a few comments on in what follows. The state of art If we look at the development of formal semantics of natural language (‘semantics’ in what follows if no confusion arises) over the last three decades or so, we see a number of changes, in both methods and scope, that both because of their sheer variety and because of the lack of unanimity among working semanticists give us reason to pause and reflect on the nature of the discipline. Of course, the idea of science as a linearly progressing enterprise getting closer and closer to the truth about its subject matter has long been exposed for what it in fact is: a myth. We have come to acknowledge that science develops in various ways, with sudden and unforeseen turns in both conceptual apparatus as well as empirical orientation. Some of the hot topics of today were fringe phenomena of a past stage, the conceptual differences between succeeding theories are sometimes very fundamental, and some of the methods, both formal and experimental, by which scientists pursue their goals, change profoundly as well. One might be inclined to think that what we observed above simply shows that semantics is no exception. But even if we grant that it is subject to the same laws as other disciplines, the development of semantics and the state it is in today are not fully