When does A = B? • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project	chosen belonging irt choosing to belong

	When does A = B? gary e. davis	December 5, 2024

When they have the same value, of course.

But who says they’re the same? A delimitation of relevance is likely constitutive.

If “A = B” (that sentence) asserts the end of a process (a derivation), then the sentence is used to assert what is the case, relative to a derivation resulting in there being “A = B, ” which is symbolic (figurative) of the deriving process which led to the result that A = B. The result of a deriving process “is” (can be regarded as) also symbolic of the deriving: that the result is derived. “A = B” is not a given fact. Knowing that gives the assertion symbolic (or tropical) meaning at the whole-assertion level. By not knowing that the assertion is derived, a person may mistak-
enly regard the assertion as factual.

That brings to mind the mention/use distinction which can be confusing. Writing ‘A = B’ (single quote marks) mentions a string of characters which may us used—“A = B” (double marks)—to assert that A is relevantly the same as B; or each have the same value.

But mentioning an assertion is usually done with double-quote marks (un-
like above): One overtly quotes someone in order to use the mentioned quotation in their paragraph. That’s not the same as asserting what’s quoted.

Commonly, double-quote marks are used in a so-to-speak sense, thereby framing what’s supposed to be the case. Some persons call frame-quote marks “scare quotes,” signaling a dubiouness of the mentioned content.
A writer who is very concerned about the difference between what people say and what’s credible would use frame quotes frequently as a mark of critical distancing.

In situation S, accepting the presence of the ‘=’ implies that ‘A = B’ is regarded as valid in S: A does equal (or is relevantly the same as) B. The proffered ‘=’ sign does, it turns out in S, mean = in this case. The mention (‘=’) is used (“=”) validly for different signs.

Certainly, all of that seems pedantic and/or trivial. But not trivial is that here A and B have no characteristics other than being subjects to a pre-existing process. There's nothing more to A and B than their derived values in a process such that they are, in the given case S, relevantly the same, belonging together only because that’s the result of the process.

next—> When do person A and person B belong together?