Descriptivism when applied to set-theoretic language says that the meanings and referents of set-theoretic expressions are implicitly defined by an associated theory. The problem of existence for descriptivism is that it doesn’t seem capable of explaining our set-theoretic knowledge, as it has often been promised to do: at best, descriptivism explains our knowledge of the truth of conditional sentences of the form ‘If there are sets, then sets are thus and so,’ but it does nothing to explain our knowledge of the existence of sets. Against this, I argue that descriptivism about logical expressions can get us knowledge of the Hilbertian claim that the consistency of an associated mathematical theory suffices for the existence of the relevant mathematical entities. Descriptivism can thus explain our set-theoretic knowledge, provided that we have reason to think that our associated theory is consistent. Along the way, I compare my descriptivist approach to recent neo-logicist, conventionalist, and pluralist approaches.