 One problem with the various paraphrase views (not to put too fine a point on it) is that none of the paraphrases seems very good. That is, the paraphrases seem to misrepresent what we actually mean when we say things like ‘3 is prime’ (and by ‘we’, I mean both mathematicians and ordinary folk). What we mean, it seems, is that 3 is prime — not that if there were numbers, then 3 would be prime, or that the sentence ‘3 is prime’ follows from the axioms of arithmetic, or any such thing. And notice how the situation here differs from cases where we do seem to have good paraphrases. For instance, one might try to claim that if we endorse the sentence