 The first intriguing thing about the proposal is its striking similarity to Hilbert’s method. Assuming Frege’s language to be rich enough to include terms for all of the objects, functions and sets that Hilbert might use in reinterpretations, there will arguably be a mapping of the kind Frege describes if and only if there is a reinterpretation of the kind Hilbert uses to show (his version of) independence: where Hilbert’s reinterpretation provides a term t with new content, Frege’s method would simply map t to a new term with that very content. And this would mean that, despite all of the objections raised by Frege, Hilbert’s method would in the end suffice to demonstrate what Frege regards as the independence of thoughts. If this is correct, then we have reason to doubt any interpretation of Frege on which his rejection of Hilbert’s method is justified. 