The large cardinal strength of Weak Vop\v{e}nka's Principle

Abstract

We show that Weak Vop\v{e}nka's Principle, which is the statement that the opposite category of ordinals cannot be fully embedded into the category of graphs, is equivalent to the large cardinal principle Ord is Woodin, which says that for every class C there is a C-strong cardinal. Weak Vop\v{e}nka's Principle was already known to imply the existence of a proper class of measurable cardinals. We improve this lower bound to the optimal one by defining structures whose nontrivial homomorphisms can be used as extenders, thereby producing elementary embeddings witnessing C-strongness of some cardinal.