 The above account of ontological commitment has been criticized from a variety of different angles. One criticism focuses on the semantics that is given for quantifiers in the formal language that is used as the canonical notation of the natural language representations of the contents of beliefs. The above, objectual semantics is not the only one that can be given to quantifiers. One widely discussed alternative is the so-called ‘substitutional semantics’. According to it we do not assign entities as values of variables. Rather, a particular quantified statement ‘\(\exists x\,Fx\)’ is true just in case there is a term in the language that when substituted for ‘\(x\)’ in \(‘Fx\rquo\) has a true sentence as its result. Thus, ‘\(\exists x\,Fx\)’ is true just in case there is an instance ‘\(Ft\)’ which is true, for ‘\(t\)’ a term in the language in question, substituted for all (free) occurrences of ‘\(x\)’ in ‘\(Fx\)’. The substitutional semantics for the quantifiers has often been used to argue that there are ontologically innocent uses of quantifiers, and that what quantified statements we accept does not directly reveal ontological commitment. (Gottlieb 1980) provides more details on substitutional quantification, and an attempt to use it in the philosophy of mathematics. Earlier work was done by Ruth Marcus, and is reprinted in (Marcus 1993).