Contents

# Contents

## Idea

What is called observational type theory (OTT) is a flavor of type theory in between extensional type theory and intensional type theory.

It may be regarded as a first-stage approximation to homotopy type theory (HoTT): the propositions of OTT correspond to the h-propositions of HoTT, and the types in OTT correspond to h-sets in HoTT. The notion of equality on OTT is based on setoids, which is a special case of higher internal groupoids. Since equality is defined type-by-type, OTT enjoys function extensionality, and a form of propositional extensionality at least for a specified universe of propositions (not necessarily including all h-propositions).

There are a few technical differences (e.g. proofs of propositions are definitionally equal in OTT, whereas proofs of hprops are only propositionally equal in HoTT) but on the whole HoTT looks a lot like a higher-dimensional version of OTT.

## References

Observational type theory was introduced in

A blog post about an Agda implementation, including propositional extensionality (which is not mentioned in the above paper) is at

The above comparison between OTT and HoTT is taken from

Last revised on July 29, 2017 at 19:03:34. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.