Paper detail

On toposes generated by cardinal finite objects

We give a characterizations of toposes which admit a generating family of objects which are internally cardinal finite (i.e. Kuratowski finite and decidable) in terms of "topological" conditions. The central result is that, constructively, a hyperconnected separated locally decidable topos admit a generating family of cardinal finite objects. The main theorem is then a generalization obtained as an application of this result internally in the localic reflection of an arbitrary topos: a topos is generated by cardinal finite objects if and only if it is separated, locally decidable, and its localic reflection is zero dimensional.