 This analogy might help one to see how Frege and Hilbert might differ in their approach to questions of consistency and interpretation.  On Frege’s view, the consistency of a group of axioms depends on content, and if the form of these axioms, under logical analysis, sufficiently captures their content, this consistency will be inherited by their formal representations as well.  Of course, in proving consistency, Hilbert was concerned primarily to determine whether an axiom system entailed a contradiction having the form \(\phi \amp \neg \phi\).  So, given this formal goal, Hilbert’s methods are useful and immune to criticism.