Enriched and internal categories: an extensive relationship

Abstract

We consider an extant infinitary variant of Lawvere's finitary definition of extensivity of a category $\mathcal V$. In the presence of cartesian closedness and finite limits in $\mathcal V$, we give two characterisations of the condition in terms of a biequivalence between the bicategory of matrices over $\mathcal V$ and the bicategory of spans over discrete objects in $\mathcal V$. Using the condition, we prove that $\mathcal{V}﹣\mathrm{Cat}$ and the category $\mathrm{Cat}_\mathrm{d}(\mathcal{V})$ of internal categories in $\mathcal V$ with a discrete object of objects are equivalent. Our leading example has $\mathcal{V} = \mathrm{Cat}$, making $\mathcal{V}﹣\mathrm{Cat}$ the category of all small 2-categories and $\mathrm{Cat}_\mathrm{d}(\mathcal{V})$ the category of small double categories with discrete category of objects. We further show that if $\mathcal V$ is extensive, then so are $\mathcal{V}﹣\mathrm{Cat}$ and $\mathrm{Cat}(\mathcal{V})$, allowing the process to iterate.