creases says Hey all, I'm pretty new to mathematics, and trying to pick things up as I find I need them.

Say I've got two formalisms, and I want to show that they are basically the same — they're carrying out the same operations, just using two different sets of symbols. What (in technical terms) am I trying to prove, and how do I go about it?

(The specific thing I'm working on right now is Kant's logic. He has a notion of concepts that works basically like set theory; but he also has a theory of "marks" that is supposed to account for something more. What I want to show is that the "marks" talk in fact adds nothing to the "concept" talk. It occurred to me that one way I might show that, would be to have a formalism of concepts and a formalism of marks, and then show that the two formalisms are equivalent somehow.)