 Because claims of consistency and of independence are fundamentally claims of non-entailment or of unprovability, it is not obvious, even once we are in possession of strong techniques for proving mathematical results, how one might go about proving consistency and independence. What Hilbert offers us, in 1899, is a systematic and powerful technique that can be used across all formalized disciplines to do just this: to prove consistency and independence. In doing so, he lays the groundwork, in concert with various of his contemporaries, for the emergence of contemporary model-theoretic techniques. (For further discussion, see Mancosu, Zach, &amp; Badesa 2009; also see entry on  nineteenth-century geometry.)  