  In Frege’s logic, however, a single rule governs both the inference from ‘John loves Mary’ to ‘Something loves Mary’ and the inference from ‘John loves Mary’ to ‘John loves something’. That’s because the subject John and the direct object Mary are both considered on a logical par, as arguments of the function loves. In effect, Frege saw no logical difference between the subject ‘John’ and the direct object ‘Mary’. What is logically important is that ‘loves’ denotes a function of two arguments. No matter whether the quantified expression ‘something’ appears as subject (‘Something loves Mary’) or within a predicate (‘John loves something’), it is to be resolved in the same way. In effect, Frege treated these quantified expressions as variable-binding operators. The variable-binding operator ‘some \(x\) is such that’ can bind the variable ‘\(x\)’ in the open sentence ‘\(x\) loves Mary’ as well as the variable ‘\(x\)’ in the open sentence ‘John loves \(x\)’. Thus, Frege analyzed the above inferences in the following general way: