  It will be useful to restate our assumptions in more neutral terms. We can do this by invoking the notion of a semantic value, which plays an important role in semantics and the philosophy of language. In these fields it is widely assumed that each expression makes some definite contribution to the truth-value of sentences in which the expression occurs. This contribution is known as the semantic value of the expression. It is widely assumed that (at least in extensional contexts) the semantic value of a singular term is just its referent.