Substructural logics naturally support a quantitative interpretation of formulas, as they are seen as consumable resources. Distances are the quantitative counterpart of equivalence relations: they measure how much two objects are similar, rather than just saying whether they are equivalent or not. Hence, they provide the natural choice for modelling equality in a substructural setting. In this paper, we develop this idea, using the categorical language of Lawvere's doctrines. We work in a minimal fragment of Linear Logic enriched by graded modalities, which are needed to write a resource sensitive substitution rule for equality, enabling its quantitative interpretation as a distance. We introduce both a deductive calculus and the notion of Lipschitz doctrine to give it a sound and complete categorical semantics. The study of 2-categorical properties of Lipschitz doctrines provides us with a universal construction, which generates examples based for instance on metric spaces and quantitative realisability. Finally, we show how to smoothly extend our results to richer substructural logics, up to full Linear Logic with quantifiers.

In quantitative reasoning one compares objects by distances, instead of equivalence relations, so that one can measure how much they are similar, rather than just saying whether they are equivalent or not. In this paper we aim at providing a logical ground to quantitative reasoning with distances in Linear Logic, using the categorical language of Lawvere’s doctrines. The key idea is to see distances as equality predicates in Linear Logic. We use graded modalities to write a resource sensitive substitution rule for equality, which allows us to give it a quantitative meaning by distances. We introduce a deductive calculus for (Graded) Linear Logic with quantitative equality and the notion of Lipschitz doctrine to give it a sound and complete categorical semantics. We also describe a universal construction of Lipschitz doctrines, which generates examples based for instance on metric spaces and quantitative realisability.

In the categorical approach to logic proposed by Lawvere, which systematically uses adjoints to describe the logical operations, equality is presented in the form of a left adjoint to reindexing along diagonal arrows in the base. Taking advantage of the modular perspective provided by category theory, one can look at those Grothendieck fibrations which sustain just the structure of equality, the so-called elementary fibrations, aka fibrations with equality. The present paper provides a characterisation of elementary fibrations which is a substantial generalisation of the one already available for faithful fibrations. The characterisation is based on a particular structure in the fibres which may be understood as proof-relevant equality predicates equipped with a principle of indiscernibility of identicals à la Leibniz. We exemplify this structure for several classes of fibrations, in particular, for fibrations used in the semantics of the identity type of Martin-Löf type theory. We close the paper discussing some fibrations related to Hofmann and Streicher's groupoid model of the identity type and showing that one of them is elementary.

Abstract The present paper aims at stressing the importance of the Hofmann–Streicher groupoid model for Martin Löf Type Theory as a link with the first-order equality and its semantics via adjunctions. The groupoid model was introduced by Martin Hofmann in his Ph.D. thesis and later analysed in collaboration with Thomas Streicher. In this paper, after describing an algebraic weak factorisation system $$\mathsf {L, R}$$ on the category $${\cal C}-{\cal Gpd}$$ of $${\cal C}$$ -enriched groupoids, we prove that its fibration of algebras is elementary (in the sense of Lawvere) and use this fact to produce the factorisation of diagonals for $$\mathsf {L, R}$$ needed to interpret identity types.

Hyland's effective topos offers an important realizability model for constructive mathematics in the form of a category whose internal logic validates Church's Thesis. It also contains a boolean full sub-quasitopos of "assemblies" where only a restricted form of Church's Thesis survives. In the present paper we compare the effective topos and the quasitopos of assemblies each as the elementary quotient completions of a Lawvere doctrine based on the partitioned assemblies. In that way we can explain why the two forms of Church's Thesis each category satisfies differ by the way each is inherited from specific properties of the doctrine which determines the elementary quotient completion.