 Frege’s understanding of, and attitude towards, the formulas of his formal language goes a long way towards explaining why his position, in the now famous debate with Hilbert about the status of the axioms in a formal system, is not an unreasonable one. At first glance, it looks as if Frege has mistakenly challenged Hilbert’s method of relative interpretability, whereby one can prove the consistency and independence of axiom systems by re-intepreting, and thereby reducing, them to systems assumed to be consistent. Frege’s objections about what exactly has been established by these relative consistency proofs may seem misguided to a modern ear.  But since Frege and Hilbert understood the notions of consistency and independence differently, they didn’t always directly engage with the other’s ideas. Blanchette nicely shows, both in the entry on the   Frege-Hilbert controversy and in her book (2012, Ch. 5), that if the notions of consistency and independence are understood Hilbert’s way, then Hilbert’s methods do establish what he says they do, but that if these notions are understood Frege’s way, they don’t. The reader should pursue these works for a more detailed explanation and nuanced discussion of the disagreement.