Amalgamable diagram shapes

Abstract

A category has the amalgamation property (AP) if every pushout diagram has a cocone, and the joint embedding property (JEP) if every finite coproduct diagram has a cocone. We show that for a finitely generated category $\mathbf{I}$, the following are equivalent: (i) every $\mathbf{I}$-shaped diagram in a category with the AP and the JEP has a cocone; (ii) every $\mathbf{I}$-shaped diagram in the category of sets and injections has a cocone; (iii) a certain canonically defined category $\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{I})$ of "paths" in $\mathbf{I}$ has only idempotent endomorphisms. When $\mathbf{I}$ is a finite poset, these are further equivalent to: (iv) every upward-closed subset of $\mathbf{I}$ is simply-connected; (v) $\mathbf{I}$ can be built inductively via some simple rules. Our proof also shows that these conditions are decidable for finite $\mathbf{I}$.

14 pages

References in corpus (1)

• Restriction categories III: colimits, partial limits, and extensivity