 Stewart Shapiro is a second philosopher of mathematics who, in the early 1980s, attempts to build on Benacerraf’s paper (see Shapiro 1983, 1989, and most systematically, Shapiro 1997). By focusing more on metaphysical questions and leaving behind hesitations about structures as objects, Shapiro’s goal is to defend a more thoroughly realist version of mathematical structuralism, thus rejecting nominalist and constructivist views (more on that below). Such realism includes the semantic aspect mentioned above (taking mathematical statements at face value); but Shapiro also wants to clarify the talk about “positions in structures” further.  He distinguishes two perspectives on them. According to the first, the positions at issue are treated as “offices”, i.e., as slots that can be filled or occupied by various objects (e.g., the position “0” in the natural number structure is occupied by \(\emptyset\) in the series of finite von Neumann ordinals).  According to the second perspective, the positions are treated as “objects” themselves; and so are the abstract structures.