On completeness and cocompleteness in and around small categories (Q1896485)

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On completeness and cocompleteness in and around small categories
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    On completeness and cocompleteness in and around small categories (English)
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    17 January 1996
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    For many important classes of categories (including toposes and accessible categories), the property of completeness is equivalent to cocompleteness. The adjoint functor theorem implies that this ``ought to be true'' in general; but the solution-set condition may fail, and so we may only draw this conclusion for small categories -- and, as \textit{P. Freyd} pointed out long ago, the result for small categories says less than it claims, since (classically) a complete small category is a preorder. However, around ten years ago \textit{E. Moggi} observed that in the non-classical context of \(\mathcal S\)-indexed categories (that is, of categories fibred over \(\mathcal S\), where \(\mathcal S\) is a suitable base category such as \textit{M. Hyland}'s effective topos), one can exhibit nontrivial examples of small categories (indeed, of small full subcategories of \(\mathcal S\) itself) which are complete and cocomplete. The present paper tackles the question: given a small \(\mathcal S\)-indexed category \(\mathbb{B}\), can we deduce the cocompleteness of \(\mathbb{B}\) from its completeness? The author sketches two possible approaches to proving such a result, based loosely on the adjoint functor theorem and on \textit{R. Paré}'s proof that complete toposes are cocomplete, and shows that they can be used to give positive answers to the question if either (a) \(\mathbb{B}\) is cartesian closed or (b) \(\mathcal S\) is locally cartesian closed. \{Reviewer's remark: the latter result does not seem to be best possible -- it should be possible to deduce the same conclusion if \(\mathcal S\) is merely cartesian closed.\} He also shows that a small full subcategory of \(\mathcal S\) which is complete must be cocomplete in all cases, and gives an example to show that the converse does not hold. \{Unfortunately for the terminology, a ``small full subcategory'' is not actually small -- or even locally small -- unless the base \(\mathcal S\) is locally cartesian closed; so this counterexample does not prove the claim made in section 0.2 that the main theorem does not hold without some additional hypothesis such as (a) or (b)\}.
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    equivalence of completeness and cocompleteness
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    toposes
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    accessible categories
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    adjoint functor theorem
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    small categories
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    cartesian closed
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