 Platonists about mathematical objects claim that the theorems of our mathematical theories — sentences like ‘3 is prime’ (a theorem of arithmetic) and ‘There are infinitely many transfinite cardinal numbers’ (a theorem of set theory) — are literally true and that the only plausible view of such sentences is that they are about abstract objects (i.e., that their singular terms denote abstract objects and their existential quantifiers range over abstract objects). This general stance toward mathematics goes back to Plato, but the first clear statement of the argument in this form was given by Frege (1884); other advocates include Quine (see his 1948 and 1951, though he doesn't explicitly state the argument there), Gödel (1964), Parsons (1965, 1971, 1994), Putnam (1971), Steiner (1975), Resnik (1981, 1997), Zalta (1983, 1999), Wright (1983), Burgess (1983), Hale (1987), Shapiro (1989, 1997), the early Maddy  (1990),[4]  Katz (1998), Colyvan (2001), McEvoy (2005, 2012), and Marcus (2015).