Classical Distributive Restriction Categories
Abstract
In the category of sets and partial functions, , while the disjoint union is the usual categorical coproduct, the Cartesian product becomes a restriction categorical analogue of the categorical product: a restriction product. Nevertheless, does have a usual categorical product as well in the form . Surprisingly, asking that a distributive restriction category (a restriction category with restriction products and coproducts ) has a categorical product is enough to imply that the category is a classical restriction category. This is a restriction category which has joins and relative complements and, thus, supports classical Boolean reasoning. The first and main observation of the paper is that a distributive restriction category is classical if and only if is a categorical product in which case we call the ''classical'' product. In fact, a distributive restriction category has a categorical product if and only if it is a classified restriction category. This is in the sense that every map factors uniquely through a total map , where is the restriction terminal object. This implies the second significant observation of the paper, namely, that a distributive restriction category has a classical product if and only if it is the Kleisli category of the exception monad for an ordinary distributive category. Thus having a classical product has a significant structural effect on a distributive restriction category. In particular, the classical product not only provides an alternative axiomatization for being classical but also for being the Kleisli category of the exception monad on an ordinary distributive category.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2305.16524,
title = {Classical Distributive Restriction Categories},
author = {Robin Cockett and Jean-Simon Pacaud Lemay},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.16524},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Published in a special issue of Theory and Applications of Categories dedicated to Pieter Hofstra (1975-2022). This version fixes a minor typo in the journal version, where we copied down the incorrect formula for eq.(25) from another reference. Fortunately, we do not use this formula in anywhere and it was only included for exposition. So the rest of the paper remains unchanged