The comments below are meant to show that considerations of public and private realms and the tension between these realms arise in a natural and persistent way in discussions connected with semiotics. In particular, they arise out of the themes of body and sociocultural mathematical meaning-making, which are recurring themes of the papers in this volume. The public-private dichotomy is related to other dichotomies such as those between outer and inner and collective and individual. For educators, such dichotomies are important in that they reflect the division between students' own inner and individual understandings of mathematical ideas and their functioning within a shared sociocultural world of mathematical meanings.