Abstract

Call a semantics for singular terms *extensionalist* if it embraces and *classical* if it embraces. -/- 1. The meaning of a singular term is exhausted by its reference. 2. The reference of a singular term is an entity that is logically simple. -/- Call a semantics *adequate* if it distinguishes material identity from formal identity. -/- Frege reacts to the inadequacy of classical extensionalist semantics by rejecting. This he does without a sideways glance at, whose background ontology, an "ontology of individuals", Frege implicitly accepts. -/- In contrast, my account of the difference between material and formal identity replaces that background ontology with one whose ground-level objects are ontologically differentiated and logically complex. The semantics I urge for singular terms, while *extensionalist* in the sense of, is thus a non-classical semantics in which singular terms take structured individuals, or complexes, as their referents. For such individuals, unlike those of Frege's ontology, keep a = b and a = a apart. -/-.