 There are many difficulties with this kind of approach. The most obvious challenge is that, in the above, the second iteration of our tense operator, “WAS” appears within the scope of the first. Thus, the attempted paraphrase of &lt;There have been 7 English Kings called “Edward”&gt; is a sentence of the form “there has been a king called ‘Edward’, and there had been a king called ‘Edward’…”. For one thing, however, suppose that there have been infinitely many entities in the past. Kings will not be a useful candidate here, so imagine instead that there have been infinitely many electrons. Hence, &lt;There have been infinitely many electrons&gt; is true. But this requires a construction with an infinite number of nested quantifiers and tense operators. This won’t do, for no such construction can be generated, despite the fact that we clearly can utter a sentence that expresses the relevant proposition, “there have been infinitely many electrons”.