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 Doctrines are categorical structures very apt to study logics of different nature within a unified environment: the 2-categoryDtnof doctrines. Modal interior operators are characterised as particular adjoints in the 2-categoryDtn. We show that they can be constructed from comonads inDtnas well as from adjunctions in it, and we compare the two constructions. Finally we show the amount of information lost in the passage from a comonad, or from an adjunction, to the modal interior operator. The basis for the present work is provided by some seminal work of John Power.

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.

One of the main goals of Explicit Constructive Logic (ECL) is to provide a constructive formulation of Full (Classical) Higher Order Logic LKω that can be seen as a foundation for knowledge representation. ECL is introduced as a subsystem Zω of LKω. The first order case Z1 and the propositional cas e Z0 of ECL are examined as well. A comparison of constructivism from the point of view of ECL and of the corresponding features of Intuitionistic Logic, and Constructive Paraconsistent Logic is proposed.

Partial equivalence relations (and categories of these) are a standard tool in semantics of type theories and programming languages, since they often provide a cartesian closed category with extended definability. Using the theory of exact categories, we give a category-theoretic explanation of why the construction of a category of partial equivalence relations often produces a cartesian closed category. We show how several familiar examples of categories of partial equivalence relations fit into the general framework.

The pioneering work on relational parametricity for the second order lambda calculus was done by Reynolds (1983) under the assumption of the existence of set-based models, and subsequently reformulated by him, in conjunction with his student Ma, using the technology of PL-categories. The aim of this paper is to use the different technology of internal category theory to re-examine Ma and Reynolds' definitions. Apart from clarifying some of their constructions, this view enables us to prove that if we start with a non-parametric model which is left exact and which satisfies a completeness condition corresponding to Ma and Reynolds "suitability for polymorphism", then we can recover a parametric model with the same category of closed types. This implies, for example, that any suitably complete model (such as the PER model) has a parametric counterpart.>

The authors consider the idea of treating a parametrized type as an arbitrary functor from some parametrizing category to a category of types, and giving elements semantics as natural transformations. They show that under reasonable hypotheses this is only possible when the parametrizing category is a groupoid. This suggests a semantics for a semiparametric form of polymorphism. They discuss the interpretation of this form of parametricity in a PER model, and show that it coincides with the ostensibly stronger form derived from dinaturality.>

A class of Partial Equivalence Relations (PERs) is described such that the resulting full subcategory of the realizability universe has the expected properties of a good category of CPOs; that is, it is a Cartesian closed category and every endomorphism has a canonical fixed point. Moreover, the reflection functor into the subcategory of strict maps (usually called the “lifting operation”) yields a good notion of “partial map,” a necessary condition if one wishes to maintain a connection between strict maps and partial maps. It is shown that all functors that arise in practice have canonical invariant objects; hence a host of domain equations are guaranteed to have solutions.

A search is conducted for a class of PERs (partial equivalence relations on the natural numbers) such that the resulting full subcategory has the expected properties of any good category of CPOs: it should be a CCC (Cartesian closed category) and every endomorphism should have a canonical fixed point. Moreover the reflection functor (usually called the lifting operation) should yield a good notion of partial map. The following topics are discussed: conventions, partial-map classifiers, ExPERS, ExPERS as domains, reflectivity of strict maps, multicorreflectivity of strict maps, the extensional natural numbers, domain equations, and intrinsic descriptions.>

Set-theoretic (or rather the more general topos-theoretic) models of polymorphic lambda-calculi are discussed under the assumption that the datatypes of the language are to be interpreted as sets and the operations as partial functions. It is shown that it is not possible to obtain a model in which function spaces are interpreted by the full partial function space, but that it is nevertheless possible to have models which incorporate a usefully large class of partial functions. The main result is that set-theoretic models do not exist, even constructively. This is a much stronger result than holds for the classical sound-order lambda calculus.>

The family of readability toposes, of which the effective topos is the best known, was discovered by Martin Hyland in the late 1970's. Since then these toposes have been used for several purposes. The effective topos itself was originally intended as a category in which various recursion-theoretic or effective constructions would live as natural parts of the higher-order type structure. For example the hereditary effective operators become the higher types over N (Hyland [1982]), and effective domains become the countably-based domains in the topos (McCarty [1984], Rosolini [1986]). However, following the discovery by Moggi and Hyland that it contained nontrivial small complete categories, the effective topos has also been used to provide natural models of polymorphic type theories, up to and including the theory of constructions (Hyland [1987], Hyland, Robinson and Rosolini [1987], Scedrov [1987], Bainbridge et al. [1987]). Over the years there have also been several different constructions of the topos. The original approach, as in Hyland [1982], was to construct the topos by first giving a notion of Pω-valued set. A Pω-valued set is a set X together with a function =x: X × X → Pω. The elements of X are to be thought of as codes, or as expressions denoting elements of some “real underlying” set in the topos. Given a pair (x,x′) of elements of X, the set =x (x,x′) (generally written ) is the set of codes of proofs that the element denoted by x is equal to the element denoted by x′.