In various scattered remarks, Frege appears to endorse the syntactic priority thesis. For example, he writes (1884: §57): “we say ‘the [number] 1’, and by means of the definite article, set up 1 as an object”. And he notes that numerals occur, not only attributively, for example, in ‘Jupiter has four moons’, but also in identity statements, such as ‘the number of Jupiter's moons is four’; and the sense of such an identity statement is just that “the expression ‘the number of Jupiter's moons’ denotes the same object as the word ‘four’”. The difficulty of identifying the appropriate use of the definite article, or when ‘is’ signals a genuine identity statement, was, perhaps, not sufficiently appreciated by Frege. But recent work (especially Dummett (1973) and Hale (1996)) has given some reason to think that genuine singular terms in English can be recognized syntactically in terms of their inferential role.