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Over on MO Denis-Charles Cisinki kindly replied to some issues that I am recently working on here. See this.
now I re-instantiated at model structure on simplicial presheaves in the section "cofibrant objects" my proof that all degreewise coproducts of representables are cofibrant. (I had removed it after somebody pointed out that Dugger assumes an extra condition to prove this, which made me worry that I had an error in my reasoning).
But before that I have included now the one order of magnitude shorter proof that Denis Charles-Cisinski pointed out (I still feel like keeping mine though... :-)
I keep oscillating. Now I realize that I don't understand Denis-Charles Cisinski's argument in detail after all.
So I now put in a warning and a question query box back in here .
The situation is a bit nerve-wrecking:
behind the scenes we have two people who should know: one of them argues that my claim that in the projective model structure on simplicial presheaves all degreewise representables are cofibrant is indeed correct and offers his own proof for it. The other one finds fault with this proof, though.
But neither of them considers my proposed proof of this statement.
But it wasn't written up nicely. I have now tried to considerably clean it up. It is at model structure on simplicial presheaves -- cofibrant objects.
The way I approach this, it is really entirely an exercise in end/coend yoga, the input from model category theory needed is minimal.
So maybe some cat theory wizards (Todd? Mike? Toby?) would like to check my reasoning. If I am making a stupid mistake it should be easy to spot for you. If my reasoning is correct, the resulting statement would be a quite useful technical statement improving the existant one in the literature (which is of course precisely what makes me nervous).
I think I found a subtle error.
Thanks, Mike. I see what you mean.
In the previous version of this attempt I had used instead the presentation of a simplicial set as a coend of only its non-degenerate cells over the category of injective order preserving maps, such as to not have to worry about the part where you now point out a mistake.
But then I realized that it is not obvious that I can take an entire presheaf of simplicial sets and restrict it to non-degenerate cells objectswise. So when I rewrote it now I thought I could just as well use the full coend . But as you point out I cannot.
Okay, thanks again. I have moved my wrong proof to the bottom of the page in a Disscussion section.
I added a section on cofibrant replacement
model structure on simplicial presheaves -- cofibrant replacement
This just states one of Dugger's cofibrant replacement functors and then has a query box. I keep staring at it but must be being silly again. Help is appreciated.
Oh, I see my mistake. Never mind.
added to local model structure on simplicial presheaves a warning that the general existence result of Bousfield localization does not apply, as the weak equivalences do not form a set, but a proper class.
This is getting on my nerves, by the way, that so many concrete constructions depend on size issues in model category theory and in (oo,1)-category theory. In principle I can handle that, but whenever size issues come up I feel like the ground on which I am walking becomes more shaky.
There was a related discussion recently on SBS. But can anyone maybe tell me again: how am I to think of the fact that size issues -- which usually one is inclined to react to by "doesn't matter, can be dealt with if desired" -- may become so crucial.
Well, maybe I just don't get it yet after all: why don't we just say, for instance: Bousfield localization of combinatorial model categories exists always, if only we pass to a large enough Grothendieck universe?
In physics discussion groups there is this recurring topic every once in a while: "Does anyone know of any physical aspect that depends crucially on set-theoretic subtleties?" Usually everybody shrugs and no example is given. But it's striking, once one realizes one needs model categories/(oo,1)-catgegories all over the place in physics, suddenly also set theoretic issues are there all over the place. Certainly nobody alerted me of that when I studied physics...
why don't we just say, for instance: Bousfield localization of combinatorial model categories exists always, if only we pass to a large enough Grothendieck universe?
Because it's not true. Changing your universe also changes the meaning of "combinatorial model category" and thereby preserves the largeness of the class of maps you may want to localize at.
More explicitly, consider the category of simplicial presheaves on a site C with some global model structure, and some class W of weak equivalences one wants to localize at. If U is a universe (and C is U-small), it is true that the class W_U of weak equivalences in is a set, where is the category of U-small simplicial sets. But is not a combinatorial model category. (One could say that it's "U-small-combinatorial" meaning that "U thinks that it is locally presentable," but of course also "U thinks that is a proper class" so that doesn't help.) The real combinatorial model category is now , which can take values in not-necessarily-U-small simplicial sets, and in that category the class W of weak equivalences is not a set (even a U-large one). We could localize with respect to the set of maps , but there's no guarantee that that would be the same as localizing at all of W.
how am I to think of the fact that size issues -- which usually one is inclined to react to by "doesn't matter, can be dealt with if desired" -- may become so crucial.
One possible answer would be that one's usual inclination can be wrong. (-: Some set theorist is fond of pointing out that even if it is true that ZFC suffices for all "real-world" mathematics and physics, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem means that this will never be more than a description of the current state of affairs.
However, I usually consider that size questions usually matter most when one wants to apply model-categorical techniques, and model categories are merely a technical tool (however ubiquitous and useful) rather than a fundamental notion. In the world of pure -categories, size questions should be much less important. (Though they may not be completely absent, neither are they completely absent from ordinary 1-category theory.)
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Changing your universe also changes the meaning of "combinatorial model category" and thereby preserves the largeness of the class of maps you may want to localize at.
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<p>Right, thanks, Mike. I guess I follow this. It <em>still</em> annoys me, though. :-)</p>
<p>But I would like to come back to your statements about the matter of size issues in categories and <img src="/extensions/vLaTeX/cache/latex_5b4e8bf1a57dcb0e372c2512e8f20c01.png" title="(\infty,1)" style="vertical-align: -20%;" class="tex" alt="(\infty,1)"/>-categories independent of models. What is really the right way to think of size issues in the context of accessible categories, presentabled categories, etc, if any?</p>
<p>I see so much talk about foundational issues, and am hoping that one day out of all this comes an answer that I cannot only follow, but that <em>feels good</em> . A good answer to what is really going on. Not sure if i can express in words whjat i am really looking for. But somehow it feels as if in category theory everything is maximally nice, except that these darn size issues get in the way. Well, I suppose the answer is I should not fight it but embrace it, then it will also feel better...</p>
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Remember, size issues are the only reason why there are complete categories other than complete lattices. So you should be grateful!
To second what Toby said, I think that at some level it is just true that size issues do matter, and maybe you should "not fight it but embrace it". Sometimes size is an avoidable detail, but sometimes it isn't. The fact that it doesn't "feel good" to you might say more about your "feel-gooder" than about the mathematics. Not that it's wrong for you to not like size issues; it is of course possible and common for good and important mathematics to seem unaesthetic to particular mathematicians. For instance, I'm not fond of involved combinatorics or computations, and though sometimes those can be avoided by categorical tricks (one reason I like category theory), other times they seem to be unavoidable, even in good and important mathematics.
I do admit to occasionally wishing that size issues could be dealt with more cleanly, though. Feferman set theory does this better than many other approaches, although it's a little too set-theoretically involved to have been widely adopted. This sort of feeling is also what motivated me to think about the possibility of a category of all sets (michaelshulman).
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