 One way to understand Frege’s contribution to the Frege-Hilbert debate, then, is to recognize the contributions Frege makes in clarifying Hilbert’s own approach to axioms, but to hold that Frege’s negative assessment of Hilbert’s technique for proving consistency and independence is mistaken. On this account, despite the difference between Frege and Hilbert over the nature of axioms, nevertheless the satisfiability of \(R_{\textit{AX}}\) does show the consistency of the collection of axioms in question, whether one conceives of those axioms in Hilbert’s way as sentences (i.e., as the collection AX) or in Frege’s way as thoughts (i.e., as the collection \(\textit{AX}_{G}\)). Similarly for independence. Frege’s mistake, on this view, is to have failed to notice that the kind of non-provability result (i.e., consistency or independence) that Hilbert takes his reinterpretations to demonstrate for geometric sentences entails a corresponding non-provability (consistency or independence) result for geometric thoughts (see Resnik 1974, Currie 1982, Dummett 1975). 