   If instead, the proposition corresponding to (7) was simply a complex consisting of the relation of identity, Scott, and the author of Waverly himself, since the author of Waverly simply is Scott, the proposition would be the same as the uninformative proposition Scott = Scott. By showing that the actual structure of the proposition is quite a bit different from what it appears from the grammar of the sentence “The author of Waverly = Scott”, Russell believed he had shown how it might be more informative than a trivial instance of the law of identity (OD, 51–54).