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topos theory

# Contents

## Idea

The Mitchell–Bénabou language is a particularly simple form of the internal language of an elementary topos $E$. It makes use of the fact that in the presence of a subobject classifier $\Omega$, there is no need to treat formulas separately from terms, since a formula or proposition can be identified with a term of type $\Omega$.

Specifically, the language is a type theory $L(E)$ where:

• the (closed) types are the objects of $E$;

• the variables of type $A$ are interpreted as identity morphisms $\mathrm{id}_A: A \to A$ in $E$;

• the terms of type $B$ in variables $x_i$ of type $X_i$ are interpreted as morphisms from the product of the $X_i$ to $B$

• the formulas are terms of type $\Omega$, where $\Omega$ is the subobject classifier;

• the propositional logical connectives are induced from the internal Heyting algebra structure of $\Omega$;

• the (type-bounded) quantifiers are induced from the internal completeness of $\Omega$ (i.e., the quantifiers are given by suitable morphisms from internal powers of $\Omega$ to $\Omega$)

• for each type $X$ there are also two binary relations $=_X$ (defined applying the diagonal map to the product term of the arguments) and $\in_X$ (defined applying the evaluation map to the product of the term and the power term of the arguments);

• a formula is true if the arrow which interprets it factors through the arrow $true: 1 \to \Omega$.

• one can also construct type families and dependent types, just as in any locally cartesian closed category: the types indexed by elements of some closed type $A$ are the objects of the slice category over $A$; sums and products of type families (i.e., $\Sigma$- and $\Pi$-types) are given by the left and right adjoints to change-of-base functors, respectively. As these slice categories will be topoi themselves, all the above structure can be interpreted for type families as well.

## Applications

The Mitchell–Bénabou language, like the internal logic of any category, is a powerful way to describe various objects in a topos as if they were sets. It can be viewed as making the topos into a generalized set theory or a type theory, so that we can write and prove statements in a topos, and properties of a topos, using first order intuitionistic predicate logic.

As is usual for type theories, we can conversely generate a syntactic or free topos $E(L)$ from any suitable theory $L$ phrased in the above language. The universal property of this topos says that logical functors $E(L)\to E$, for any other topos $E$, are equivalent to models of the theory $L$ in $E$.

Last revised on July 5, 2017 at 08:27:09. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.