Meanwhile, back in math land... A couple-few months ago I was doing some work on apartness relations. In particular, I was looking into foundational issues, and into what an apartness-based (rather than equality-based) dependently-typed programming language would look like. Unfortunately, too many folks think "constructive mathematics" only means BHK-style intuitionistic logic— whereas constructive mathematics includes all sorts of other concepts, and they really should be better known!
So I started writing a preamble post, introducing the basic definitions and ideas behind apartnesses, and... well, I kinda got carried away. Instead of a blog post I kinda ended up with a short chapter. And then, well, panic struck. In the interests of Publish Ever, Publish Often, I thought I might as well share it: a brief introduction to apartness relations. As with my blog posts, I'm releasing it under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0; so feel free to share it and use it for classes. But, unlike the other columbicubiculomania files, it is not ShareAlike— since I may actually turn it into a published chapter someday. So do respect that. And if you have a book that needs some chapters on apartness relations, get in touch!
The intro goes a little something like this:
We often talk about values being "the same as" or "different from" one another. But how can we formalize these notions? In particular, how should we do so in a constructive setting?
Constructively, we lack a general axiom for double-negation elimination; therefore, every primitive notion gives rise to both strong (strictly positive) and weak (doubly-negated) propositions. Thus, from the denial of (weak) difference we can only conclude weak sameness. Consequently, in the constructive setting it is often desirable to take difference to be a primitive— so that, from the denial of strong difference we can in fact conclude strong sameness.
This ability "un-negate" sameness is the principal reason for taking difference to be one of our primitive notions. While nice in and of itself, it also causes the strong and weak notions of sameness to become logically equivalent (thm 1.4); enabling us to drop the qualifiers when discussing sameness.
But if not being different is enough to be considered the same, then do we still need sameness to be primitive? To simplify our reasoning, we may wish to have sameness be defined as the lack of difference. However, this is not without complications. Sameness has been considered a natural primitive for so long that it has accrued many additional non-propositional properties (e.g., the substitution principle). So, if we eliminate the propositional notion of primitive equality, we will need somewhere else to hang those coats.
The rest of the paper fleshes out these various ideas.