Dialectica space

Dialectica spaces are a categorical way of constructing models of linear logic.

They were introduced by Valeria de Paiva, Martin Hyland's student, in her doctoral thesis, as a way of modeling both linear logic and Gödel's dialectica interpretation—hence the name.

Given a category C and a specific object K of C with certain (logical) properties, one can construct the category of Dialectica spaces over C, whose objects are pairs of objects of C, related by a C-morphism into the given object. Morphisms of Dialectica spaces are similar to Chu space morphisms, but instead of an equality condition, they have an inequality condition, which is read as a logical implication, the first object implies the second.

References

• K. Gödel. "Uber eine bisher noch nicht benutzte Erweiterung des finiten Standpunktes - Dialectica", 1958. (Translation and analysis in Collected Works, Vol II, Publications, 1937-1974—eds S. Feferman et al., 1990).

• V. de Paiva. "The Dialectica Categories". In Proc. of Categories in Computer Science and Logic, Boulder, CO, 1987. Contemporary Mathematics, vol 92, American Mathematical Society, 1989 (eds. J. Gray and A. Scedrov)

• V. de Paiva. "A dialectica-like model of linear logic". In Proc. Conf. on Category Theory and Computer Science, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science 389, pp. 341–356, Manchester, September 1989.