Conservative regular representation in sets
ID: conservative-regular-representation-in-sets
For a regular category that is a small category, a regular functor to the Category of sets that reflects isomorphisms exists exactly when the category has almost total support for a regular category. Necessity follows because a nonempty image forces the object's support to be terminal, while an empty image makes all projections invertible and makes all equalizers of maps out of invertible. This proves that is strict initial. For sufficiency, use the capitalization theorem to map conservatively and regularly into a capital regular category, then take global sections of a capital regular category. Well-supported objects retain points; proper strict initial objects retain empty point sets. A bijection between nonempty point sets makes the image subobject entire and makes the kernel-pair diagonal entire, by well-pointedness. Thus the image arrow is both a regular epimorphism and a monomorphism, and is invertible. The capitalization theorem is a substantive existence input; this argument does not infer arbitrary large-category representability from small-category hypotheses.
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