 We have surveyed two ways of understanding Frege’s objections to Hilbert’s techniques for proving consistency and independence. The first takes Frege to be fundamentally mistaken, with the error located in his failure to appreciate the connection between the satisfiability of a set of reinterpretable sentences and the associated independence/consistency claims. The second takes Frege to be fundamentally correct in the sense that (i) he understands the consistency and independence of thoughts to turn not just on the surface syntax of the sentences that express them but also on the contents of the simple terms used in their expression, and (ii) consistency and independence, so understood, are not demonstrable in Hilbert’s manner. 