On equality of objects in categories in constructive type theory

Abstract

In this note we remark on the problem of equality of objects in categories formalized in Martin-L\"of's constructive type theory. A standard notion of category in this system is E-category, where no such equality is specified. The main observation here is that there is no general extension of E-categories to categories with equality on objects, unless the principle Uniqueness of Identity Proofs (UIP) holds. We also introduce the notion of an H-category, a variant of category with equality on objects, which makes it easy to compare to the notion of univalent category proposed for Univalent Type Theory by Ahrens, Kapulkin and Shulman.