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Thomas Holder has been working on Aufhebung. I have edited the formatting a little (added hyperlinks and more Definition-environments, added another subsection header and some more cross-references, cross-linked with duality of opposites).
For completeness I have added an brief entry level of a topos and cross-linked a bit.
Let me look at the most basic case. That is Aufhebung for means that
and that is minimal with this property. What is the statement regarding conditions under which this is the case?
By adjunction and using that the initial object in a topos is stict, it follows that is equivalent to the statement that the only object with no global points is itself, because
Is that automatic? (This is probably elementary, please bear with me.) And how to see or check that is minimal with this property?
I guess my wording in the entry is a bit careless, as I brought in the general context of categories of being in order to motivate the metaphysical lingo for and its Aufhebung, though Lawvere proves this only in special cases e.g. in the 1991 ’Hegelian taco’ paper. so unless, a proof for the general case can be cooked up, I am afraid I’ve to row back a bit in the entry.
It maybe worth mentioning that a negative result of a (sufficiently) cohesive topos where this Aufhebungs relation fails to hold would also show the limits of the particular categorical interpretation of Hegel’s logic.
Let me connect this with something more familiar to me. To say that is an essential subtopos, with essentiality , is almost the same as to say that is a connected local geometric morphism, except that we don’t ask to be left exact. Right?
What does it mean for two levels to be “consecutive”?
re #3:
to say that in a more pronounced way, the condition implies that the ambient -topos has homotopy dimension relative to the sub--topos of -modal objects. This is a property enjoyed by all models for which the -subtopos is (by this proposition). So is this “Aufhebung” a strong classicality condition on the -modal subtopos?
re #5: I’d say “yes, of course”, but that means I am probably missing some subtlety that you have in mind :-)
Are you sure that and are named correctly? If the are intended to suggest the “possibly” and “necessarily” modalities of classical modal logic, then should be the monad and the comonad.
re #6:
this refers to the Idea section here. I just meant two levels where one includes the previous one, I have changed it now to read as follows:
If for two levels the second one includes the modal types of the idempotent comonad of the first one, and if it is minimal with this property, then Lawvere speaks of “Aufhebung” (see there for details) of the unity of opposites exhibited by the first one.
@#8: the notation was chosen by me probably after having looked in which way the modal operators are adjoint to replace of Lawvere (1989) or the used in KRRZ11. In complies broadly with the intuition to have necessity on the ’right’ side of being/sheaf but feel free to choose something more suitable.
Thomas, can you explain further your reasons for assigning and in that order? I don’t understand why necessity would be on the right side.
My decision came from a short look at p.116 in the ’ generic figures’ book of Reyes et.al. where they define and in context of an inclusion of posets; in which case then whereas the nlab entry defines the composition dually in reverse order. so this should probably be changed, sorry for the confusion!
I think Mike’s point is that for the notation here its not the side of the adjunction but whether we have a monad or comonad that decides what the box is. The box should be a comonad as for necessity. That is consistent with what you cite from Reyes, but not with using box for .
(We are lacking an Lab page that says this comprehensively. Something should go at modal operator )
I agree, my choice was hasty as I looked only for an adjunction between the modal operators without realizing that they were defined dually. Though I must admit that I found the choice esthetically pleasing - it would be good to have some suggestive symbols.
Back to the Aufhebung via global points:
so over every infinity-cohesive site it is true that , I suppose.
Since here indeed only the initial sheaf has no global points. (E.g. if a sheaf on has no global points, that means it assigns the empty set to , but that means it must assigns the empty set to each since there do exist maps ).
What I am talking about is now cleaned up here. Let me know if I am hallucinating (it’s late here).
Ok, I’ve switched and in the entry.
I did this just by exclusion principle: according to #12 the diamond has been used for the left adjoint, so the circle remains for the right adjoint.
But I am happy with any other convention/tendency.
Cancel what I just wrote having actually read what was written.
If that’s suggesting in modality that is less used by modal logicians for possibility, then that’s wrong. As far as I’m concerned it’s used as much as :
Also is used for a modality, in particular if it is left adjoint to a .
On the other hand we could choose to make such a convention of distinguishing left and right adjoint monads. But let’s be explicit.
What about the differential cohesive comonads? Shouldn’t we have notation to distinguish left and right adjoints there too?
How do modal logicians choose between and ? What does the choice indicate for them, if anything?
As far as I’m aware it’s just an arbitrary choice of notation, like , , or & is a choice for conjunction.
Thanks. I’ll rephrase the statement in the entry then. Just a moment…
If anything I’d say is the more commonly used of the two. The SEP modal logic entry chooses it. So, all things equal, I’d have it as the left adjoint monadic modality.
Okay, I have tried to edit accordingly here. Please feel invited to further edit if you see further need.
When adjunctions between modalities matter, there is a tendency …
My knowledge of these situations is so small I couldn’t speak of a tendency. I don’t know of any philosophers who have raised the issue of adjunctions. Do people know about computer science, etc.? Even Hermida as mentioned here seems to have the dichotomies lined up.
But what about my final point in #21? Should one use just for left/right adjoint comodalities and ? Sometimes people have used L and M for necessity/possibility.
Okay, I have changed “tendency to use” to “some authors use”. Then I added one more example, namely
(where the left part of cohesion appears in terms of adjoint modalities on p. 367).
Maybe “some authors” is just “Gonzalo Reyes”, though? Hermida does not seem to use the symbols from modal logic, does he?
Regarding notation for differential cohesion: I may not know what candidates there are from traditional theory. Maybe none? I don’t know. The situation of differential cohesion seems to have been missed, by and large.
Hermida uses and in the abstract, but then angled and square parentheses around a relation symbol.
Ah, right. So under this translation, does he have as the right adjoint?
It seems that is always on the right.
Thanks. I see it now in remark 3.3. Good, so I’ll add that to the entry modality, too. So then maybe “tendency to use” is not that bad after all. Do we known an author who explicitly does not use that convention?
Hm, on the other hand, Hermida’s article has be a monad, not a comonad.
Where? I see him say
Monadic interpretation of ,
but that’s expected.
In that remark 3.3 he says that his is the composition of pullback followed by dependent sum, and that his is the composition of pullback followed by dependent product. That makes a monad.
Sorry for bringing this up again, as the entry now has on the left, I would suggest wispering to use on the right in the context of Aufhebung as this nicely suggests ’being’ unless this interferes negatively with the convention you just set up. As this is just a tiny detail I would very much like to avoid a discussion on this and propose to drop the subject when you don’t like the idea.
Yes, that’s exactly what we seem to have agreed on over at modality – Notation.
I’ll change it at Aufhebung, too.
BTW, any comment on #17? We talked about it by email. It now seems to me that it does work for the “standard examples” of cohesion. But let me know if I am missing something.
Assuming that you use corollary II of Yoneda lemma in the last step of the proof of prop.1 at Aufhebung I think that prop.1 is ok.
As far as I can tell the proof of prop.1 uses only the strictness of and the rest is purely general using just the adjointness and the specific equivalences you assume, so this seems to be valid more generally for extensive cats with an adjunction that relates to in the appropriate way without being necessarily , no !?
To see through prop.2 I’d need time to acquire some knowledge on infinity-cohesive-sites. This should be easier to see for someone with better grounding in the higher categorical point of view though, I guess.
In any case, it would be nice to have this somewhat more general result for the Aufhebung of .
Thanks for the feedback. For the argument in prop. 2 the homotopy theory is irrelevant (I should have pointed to cohesive site!), you may just as well consider just plain presheaves. It’s meant to be a trivial argument: the site by assumption has a terminal object and there is a morphism from that terminal object to every other object. That implies that if a presheaf (of sets) assigns the empty set to that terminal object, it has to assign the empty set to every other object of the site, too.
I have edited the formatting of the central definition a bit in order to make the central ideas spring to the eye more vividly. Now it reads as follows:
Let be levels, def. \ref{Level}, of a topos we say that the level is lower than level , written
(or for short) when every i-sheaf (-modal type) is also a j-sheaf and every i-skeleton (-modal type) is a j-skeleton.
Let , we say that the level resolves the opposite of level , written
(or just for short) if .
Finally a level is called the Aufhebung of level
iff it is a minimal level which resolves the oppose of level , i.e. iff and for any with then it holds that .
=–
It seems to me that this here is proof that over a cohesive site is Aufhebung of . But check that I am not being stupid here:
+– {: .num_prop #OverCohesiveSiteBecomingIsAufgehoben}
Let be a cohesive site (or ∞-cohesive site) and its cohesive sheaf topos with values in Set (or its cohesive (∞,1)-topos ).
Then in we have Aufhebung, def. \ref{Aufhebung}, of the duality of opposites of becoming .
=–
+– {: .proof}
By prop. \ref{OverCohesiveSiteBecomingIsResolved} we have that resolves and so it remains to see that it is the minimal level with this property. But the subtopos of sharp-modal types is Set which is clearly a 2-valued Boolean topos. By this proposition these are the atoms in the subtopos lattice hence are minimal as subtoposes and hence also as levels.
=–
David,
coming back to #34-#35 and also to our discussion in person on the justification of calling a -modality the “necessity” modality:
if we turn what Hermida does around, then everything makes sense to me.
Namely: if we
read “necessarily” as the name specifically for the “for all”-operation turned into a comonad;
read “possibly” as the name specifically for the “there exists”-operation turned into a monad;
then first of all is a comonad as desired and moreover then its interpretation as formalizing “necessity” is indeed justified:
for let be a “context” which you may want to think of as the “type of all possible worlds”, and if is a proposition about terms of type , then
the statement that “for it is necessarily true that ” is just another way to say in Enlish that “for all it is true that ”;
the statement that “for it is possibly true that ” is just another way to say in Enlish that “there exists such that it is true that ”;
So, more formally, given the adjoint triple of dependent sum context extension dependent product
then it makes justified sense to call the induced (co-)-monads
“possibility” and “necessity”, respectively, because
by the established interpretation of as “there exists ” we have that holds for a given precisely if it holds for at least one , hence if it is possible in the context for it to hold at all;
by the established interpretation of as “for all ” we have that holds for a given precisely if it holds for all hence if it is inevitable, hence necessary, in the context that if holds.
Sorry for the interruption, but I had to fix the definition of Aufhebung as the minimality is defined relative to the usual order of the levels in the literature. For this I reused as the order of levels and tried to use predecessor-equality for the resolution relation but the local teX doesn’t know my dialect.
Let me see if I understand – you changed the notation in the first clause in the definition, but should you not also change it in the last line then? Maybe I am missing something.
By the way, regarding your email: the reason that I oriented these diagrams as I did as opposed to with levels going upwards is just because I wouldn’t know how to typeset the order relation going vertically.
ad 44#: to me the definition appears to be as intended unless I forgot to switch notation at some place. The problem was previously it used for the minimality where it should have used the essential subtopos order which I then thought best to denote with the least marked . I think I’ll try later to use and instead of and as they have rotated versions and .
Thomas, if it is as intended, then my question would be why this is intended. Why use in the last line of the definition not the same order relation as introduced in the first line? What’s the rationale for this?
I start to see your point here, the way I stated the definition is cooked up out of Lawvere 89 who defines this for graphic toposes and states everything in terms of the pretty-well behaved ideals in the underlying category, so I kept his terminology but looked for the definitions in terms of subtoposes to KRRZ11 which I’ve read in the way that and are two different things, but actually life becomes much easier if they are the same. I was already looking for a proposition showing their compatibility in order to prove that quintessential localizations are their proper Aufhebung. I guess you are right.
It seems we’d have the freedom to make a definition either way, after all this is to formalize something that Hegel said, and depending on how we feel about that and depending on which mathematics we would like to see developed, we may feel that different definitions are appropriate. I am just thinking that in any case there should be some kind of justification. The order relation via subcollections of modal types seems well motivated, but then switching to a different relation along the way seems to call for a reason.
I’ll be happy with whatever definition leads to something interesting. In any case I am presently short of examples of subtoposes which would be in relation in one of the senses under consideration, but not in the other. Maybe we should try to get hold of some examples for such a phenomenon to get a feeling for which kind of subtlety the definition should try to take care of.
This is long overdue: I have started at differential cohesion – relation to infinitesimal cohesion to add some first notes on how differential cohesion
induces “relative” shape and flat – such that when this extends to a level
then this level exhibits infinitesimal cohesion.
This is the case in particular for the model of formal smooth ∞-groupoids and all its variants (formal complex-analytic -groupoids, etc.).
But I think in all these cases does not provide Aufhebung for .
This is because: for being -modal hence being a discrete object, then maps out of any object in the site, which are equivalently maps , are maps out of the disjoint union of all formal disks in into . These are again representable (we are over the site of formal smooth manifolds) and so these maps are equivalent to . But is discrete and hence constant as a sheaf on the Cahiers-site, and so these are equivalent to which in turns is equivalent to maps and hence to maps . So by Yoneda we conclude that in this case, but this is in general not equivalent to .
So, do you mean that lacks Aufhebung ? If this is the case, couldn’t be regarded as a sort of homotopy approximation to the Aufhebung i.e. is construction of from sufficiently canonical !?
I haven’t really thought about under which conditions has Aufhebung, all I meant to say here is that there is naturally this level sitting above it, but that in the standard model this level, at least, is not even a resolution of . There might be others that are, though.
And regarding this being canonical: the claim is that if differential cohesion is given, then is canonically given. Think of it this way: differential cohesion is not really a level above cohesion, because of the “carrying” of the adjoints to the left. But it canonically induces and so as a soon as that happens to have an adjoint , then thereby it induces something that is a level over cohesion.
So maybe it’s good to think of this as some kind of “carrying back to the right”-operation, if you wish.
Unfortunately, I am not sufficiently familiar with your example to fully understand the details but I asked because I have the understanding that is actually a quality type hence its own Aufhebung !? So my idea is that in some sense it comes reasonably closest to provide Aufhebung for a level which otherwise lacks Aufhebung.
In order for this to make sense, one would probably like to demand that is the smallest quality type that subsumes .
Yes, right, in the given model the -level exhibits what “we” here had decided to call “infinitesimal cohesion”, which is essentially another word for what Lawvere had called a “quality type”.
And yes, I’d agree that it would make much sense to regard as being the “next” level after . After all, the sequence of inclusions of levels
reads in words “a) the single point, b) collections of points, c) collections of points with infinitesimal thickening”.
And it seems clear in the model (though I’d have to think about how to prove it) that (when given by first-order infinitesimals) should be the smallest nontrivial level above flat .
Ah, I should be saying this more properly (and this maybe highlights a subtlety in language that we may have not properly taken account of somewhere else in the discussion):
in the topos over the site of formal smooth manifolds, the sub-topos of -modal types is “infinitesimally cohesive” in that restricted to it the map is an equivalence.
coming back to #50:
on the other hand, of course does provide Aufhebung of cohesion in the sense that .
Of course this follows trivially here, since we are one step to the left and both of and correspond to the same subcategory.
coming back to #16:
I used to think and say that in the axioms of cohesion the extra exactness condtions on the shape modality seem to break a little the ultra-elegant nicety of the rest of the axioms. There is an adjoint triple of (co-)monads, fine… and in addtition the leftmost preserves the terminal object – what kind of axiomatics is that?!
But Aufhebung now shows the pattern: that extra condition on the shape modality
is just a dual to the “Aufhebung of becoming”
Maybe a co-Aufhebung, or something.
That makes me want to experiment with re-thinking about a possibly neater way of defining differentially cohesive toposes.
Something like this:
A differential cohesive topos is (…of course…) a topos equipped with two idempotent monads such that there are adjoints and (…but now:) and such that
(clear:) and
(maybe:) and .
I need to go through what I have to see what the minimum needed here is. I certainly need for the relative infinitesimal cohesion to come out right. Also , which would follow from the above.
In any case, I feel now one should think of these axioms as describing a picture of the following form (the Proceß)
and the question is what an elegant minimal condition is to encode the -s.
I wrote out a more detailed proof of the statement here that the bosonic modality preserves local diffeomorphisms.
It seems the proof needs not just Aufhebung in that
but needs also that this is compatible with the -unit in that sends the -unit of an object to itself, up to equivalent
This is true in the model of super formal smooth -stacks, so I am just adding this condition now to the axioms. But it makes me wonder if one should add this generally to the concept of Aufhebung, or, better, if I am missing something and this condition actually follows from the weaker one.
added to the discussion here of Aufhebung over cohesive sites pointer to lemma 4.1 in
which obverseves this more generally when pieces-have-points.
At MPI Bonn this Aufhebungs-announcement is flying around (full pdf by In Situ Art Society).
I have take the liberty to add it to the entry Aufhebung.
The quote from Hegel is 113 from here:
Cancelling, superseding, brings out and lays bare its true twofold meaning which we found contained in the negative: to supersede (aufheben) is at once to negate and to preserve.
under this section, we read:
the functors L and R must actually correspond to inclusions of disjoint subcategories
I take it this is not necessary in general, and is only true here since the composites are equal to the identity. I think that in general, when the composites are merely isomorphic to the identity, the subcategories have intersection given by the equalizer of the subcategory inclusions. Is this reasoning sound?
From a quick glance at the section you link, to the disjointness property is meant only for the particular example. In the general case, the two subcategories are usually far from disjoint, in fact, one can think of the process of Aufhebung as a gradual level-to-level augmentation of the objects in the intersection, that contains the ’true thoughts’ where content (left inclusion) coincides with notion (right inclusion), starting from up to .
Welcome Peter, from another philosopher.
I’m very interested in your “potted example”. The reading group I belong to will soon be reading Paul Redding on the lost subtleties of negation possible in term logic in his ’Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought’.
Have you written on the Kant-Vickers connection?
Well you’d have been very welcome to the workshop anyway even if just to attend.
Interesting you mention Brandom. I jotted down a note which sounds like it may be in the same direction as your criticism. (By the way, I overlapped here with Ken Westphal for a couple of years.)
When you have something to read on what you describe in the 3rd paragraph, I’d be very interested.
Unfortunately, the reading group is just a bunch of us in a room thrashing things out.
@#65: Peter, concerning the passage you criticize though I would admit the sin of ’rhetoric’ I would deny the charge of ’dark age rhetoric’. The intention there is to provoke the reader with the idea that the ’logical lightweight’ Hegel outdoes Kant when it comes to having a critical attitude to traditional logic (note the implied suggestion to view Hegel as an expansion of the Kantian project to logic) and more generally that the postKantian philosophers of the 1790 were quick to dismiss practically all preceding ’dogmatic’ metaphysics but often took the traditional laws of formal reasoning for granted. I am probably willing now to exempt at least some of the postKantians from this charge since some of them felt indeed that the critical philosophy demanded a revision of traditional logic e.g. Salomon Maimon published a ’Neue Theorie des Denkens’ in 1794, Jacob Siegismund Beck, a mathematician from Kant’s inner circle published a ’Lehrbuch der Logik’ in 1820 introducing transcendental concepts into traditional logic, and Fichte in 1808 lectured on ’transcendental logic’ producing a large posthumously published text. The point is that Kant did not feel this need, the Jaesche-Logik contains the famous quote that general and pure logic is dull and short and basically a closed chapter since antiquity (or something like this), a quote that made it into the 1928 textbook of Hilbert and Ackermann who obviously did not think that chapter quite as closed neither did Leibniz before them.
This does not mean that the Jaesche-Logik is unimportant for the philosophy of logic nor that Kant’s transcendental logic cannot not fruitfully confronted with geometric logic, though calling the later ’Kant’s logic’ runs into the problem that Kant admitted traditional logic as a valid form of reasoning regardless of the objective content of the concepts employed i.e. to the extent that Kant ’had’ a logic traditional logic is a better candidate for it, in my view.
That Kant’s reasoning is inherently constructive is due to his attempt to model philosophy on the reasoning with constructions in Euclid’s geometry and the later is also an albeit remote source of geometric logic. Anyway, I am the last person to belittle Kant who is in fact one of the brightest stars on my philosophical firmament. In the later passages of the nLab article the continuity between Kant and the postkantian systems and Hegel is stressed. I generally find it useful to view thinkers like Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel to be involved in a common project of transcendental philosophy which in my view is highly relevant to contemporary philosophy or cognitive science and deserves to be formalized by methods of modern mathematics.
Concerning Ploucquet, there is a German-Latin edition of his Logic by Michael Franz available as well as an article by Redding exploring the connection between Hegel and Ploucquet called THE ROLE OF LOGIC “COMMONLY SO CALLED” IN HEGEL’S SCIENCE OF LOGIC presumably available from his homepage as a preprint. In the context of cognitive underpinning for sheaf theory the link to the Petitot paper at Aufhebung might be interesting as well.
In any case, feel free to edit or expand Aufhebung when you cannot stomach certain passages. Additional insights or views are always appreciated and generally encouraged by the nLab!
@#69 Peter, regarding editing pages, the general rule is that anything on nLab can be edited, with announcement here if substantial. For others’ private webs, I just correct typos.
As for my own, where that Brandom note is, I just collect together some sketchy thoughts there. I’d be happy to read your thoughts there, if you could designate them as yours.
@Peter,
there is a syntax for query boxes, we don’t use it much these days, with discussion being held here instead, but you could still use it. That would help separate your questions/comments from what David C wrote.
Added a reference to the recent article by Marmolejo-Menni on “level ”.
best practice not to link directly to a pdf, but always to its HTML landing page, if available (as in the present case: [arXiv:2308.04584])
(on Twitter the arXiv even has a bot running to remind people of this netiquette — here I am that bot)
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