The Lawvere condition

Abstract

The original Lawvere condition asserts that every reflexive graph admits a unique natural structure of internal groupoid. This property was identified by P. T. Johnstone, following a question by A. Carboni and a suggestion by F. W. Lawvere, and it plays a central role in the characterization of naturally Mal'tsev categories. A broad and conceptually rich generalization emerges when the condition is formulated relative to a chosen class of spans. In this setting, the familiar Mal'tsev situation is recovered when the class consists of internal relations (that is, jointly monic spans) in which case the condition states that every internal reflexive relation is an equivalence relation. The purpose of this paper is to establish a comprehensive equivalence theorem that unifies the various categorical and diagrammatic formulations of the relative Lawvere condition. Furthermore, this formulation retains its significance even beyond the context of categories with finite limits, extending, for example, to categories admitting pullbacks of split epimorphisms along split epimorphisms. In addition to providing a fresh perspective on previously established results, we present a new characterization involving Janelidze-Pedicchio pseudogroupoids.