 Though widely accepted this type of argument can be contested. Leibniz's Law, again understood as ranging over identity properties, is used to derive step (4)—b has the property of being necessarily identical with a—from step (3), a has the property of being necessarily identical with a. We might deny that there are any such modal properties. Doing so blocks the argument if the application of LL is restricted to properties. Alternatively we might allow that there are such properties as being necessarily identical with a, but deny that (3) follows from (2). On one view all that follows from (2) is that a has the property of being necessarily identical with itself expressed by the predicate ‘[λx x=x]’. We need to distinguish the property of being necessarily identical with itself, which every existent has, from the property of being necessarily identical with a—which only a has (Lowe 1982). Finally, we might reject (2) on the following grounds. There is a well entrenched convention that repeated tokens of the same type of name, constant or variable are assigned the same value. From the existence of this convention it follows that ‘a = a’ expresses a truth. It does not follow that ‘a = a’ expresses something necessarily true.