These might seem silly—obviously
1 is one and
2 is two and
+ is addition (and everyone knows what equality is).
But perhaps we’
re working in a
modular group Z/p where
1 and
2 are not the usual numbers but
equivalence classes thereof? Or maybe we’
re working in some
model where the symbol
1 is actually interpreted as the number
100 (this could come about by considering the image of
(Z,+) under the
automorphism x↦x+99.
In a similar vein, a As a side-note: we could read the phrase “with respect to” as literally meaning “giving respect to”, which makes some sense. When we say “XYZ with respect to A”, we are in some literal sense “giving respect to” A in our interpretation of XYZ.
Often times these relationships are explicit; in the definition
One time it
is worth the disambiguation is when we are working with two different
topologies τ,ρ. Then context only tells us that a
set U being ‘open’ means it is probably open in either
τ or
ρ, but not which.