People mean to do various things. Body organs are meant to do various things. Tools and other artifacts are meant for various things. Conventional signs such as words and sentences mean various things. People mean various things by using words and sentences and not always the same things that the words or sentences mean. Natural signs mean things. If there are representations in people's brains, presumably these also mean things. Varieties of Meaning tells the story of how these various kinds of meaning are related to one another. None can be well understood, I believe, without grasping its relation to the others. What something means, or is meant for, or is meant to do, sometimes has to do with its purpose. Part One describes a hierarchy of levels on which purposes are created by a hierarchy of forms of selection, beginning with natural selection of genes and proceeding through to the selection of certain cultural forms, including specific linguistic forms, whose purposes are to facilitate certain kinds of social coordination. Explicit human intentions are particularly interesting within the hierarchy because they represent their own purposes, the purposes that they themselves have, these purposes being, in a very wide sense, biological purposes. Through joint effects at several levels of selection, explicitly represented purposes and intentions have been selected, in part, for helping to effect whatever they represent. (The mechanisms for determining what will be represented by intentions are, of course, also selected and at various levels.) A variety of levels of purpose are entwined and partially fused within the structure of human action in such a way that no significant divide emerges between personal and subpersonal levels. On the other hand, in the case of language it is helpful initially to draw a careful distinction between the cooperative purposes of the various linguistic forms themselves and the purposes of the people who use them.