Completeness of the category of enriched categories

category-theoryenriched-category-theorymonoidal-categories

In the nLab entry on strict n-categories, one reads:

For $V$ any complete and cocomplete closed monoidal category, also $VCat$ (the category of V-enriched categories) has these same properties.

Is there a simple proof to this result?
I believe a not-so-simple proof should follow from Corollary 7.6.4 of Categorical Homotopy Theory:

A $V$-category is $V$-complete and $V$-cocomplete if it is tensored and if its underlying category is complete and cocomplete.

But I couldn't construct it, since there seem to be many nontrivial steps to deconstruct $V$-limits to usual limits, which are what we're interested in here.

Best Answer

It's easiest to understand this question by relating $V$-categories to $V$-graphs. A $V$-graph $G$ is given by a set of objects $\mathrm{ob} G$ together with an object of $V$, denoted by $G(x,y)$, for every $x,y\in \mathrm{ob} G$.

As in the case of $V=\mathrm{Set}$, limits of $V$-categories are created by the forgetful functor into $V$-graphs. This means that the object set and the homs in a limit of $V$-categories are given by the corresponding limits of sets and of hom-objects in $V$, respectively. Coproducts of $V$-categories are just disjoint unions, so it's only coequalizers that really present some difficulties. That said, they really present some difficulties! See the following (freely available) paper of Wolff for the full construction, which proves along the way that $V$-categories are monadic over $V$-graphs. Wolff's paper

Frequently, the enriching category $V$ is in fact locally presentable, not just complete and cocomplete. In fact this is pretty much always the case unless $V=\mathrm{Top}$. In that case it may be shown that $V$-Cat is also locally presentable, which gives a higher-level proof that the latter is cocomplete. It was proved much later than Wolff's paper by Lack and Kelly that the following hold, if $V$ is cocomplete and tensors preserve colimits-for instance $V$ could be closed, but this is not required, and $V$ needn't be symmetric:

  • $V$-Cat is in fact finitarily monadic over $V$-Graph, that is, the forgetful functor's left adjoint giving the free $V$-category on a graph preserves filtered colimits.
  • $V$-Graph is locally $\lambda$-presentable when $V$ is so. This requires direct arguments at least as complex as Wolff's, though couched in a nice general formalism of $V$-matrices.
  • By general nonsense, we conclude from the previous two points that $V$-cat is $\lambda$-locally presentable when $V$ is so, and in particular must be cocomplete.

Neither of these papers produces a practically usable algorithm for computing colimits of $V$-categories, but this is unavoidable-for $V=$Set, considering $V$-categories with one object and focusing on coequalizers of maps between free objects, we have recovered the question of computing a monoid from generators and relations, which is known to be generally undecidable.

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