 Hale develops and defends the Fregean idea that “the division of non-linguistic entities into different types or categories [is] dependent upon a prior categorization of the types of expressions by means of which we refer to them” (2010, 403). As he develops the idea, to be an object is “to be the referent of a possible singular term, to be a property is to be the referent of a possible (first-level) predicate, and so on for other cases” (2010, 411). He also argues that this encourages a deflationary approach to existence questions according to which we may argue for the existence of entities of a certain kind by simply arguing “that there are true statements involving expressions of the relevant kind” (2010, 406).