The Yoneda Lemma is a simple result of category theory, and its proof is very straightforward.


Yet I feel like I do not truly understand what it is about; I have seen a few comments here mentioning how it has deeper implications into how to think about representable functors.


What are some examples of this? How should one think of the Yoneda Lemma?



"Philosophical" meaning of the Yoneda Lemma
One way to look at it is this:


for $C$ a category, one wants to look at presheaves on $C$ as being "generalized objects modeled on $C$" in the sense that these are objects that have a sensible rule for how to map objects of $C$ into them. You can "probe" them by test objects in $C$.


For that interpretation to be consistent, it must be true that some $X$ in $C$ regarded as just an object of $C$ or regarded as a generalized object is the same thing. Otherwise it is inconsistent to say that presheaves on $C$ are generalized objects on $C$.


The Yoneda lemma ensures precisely that this is the case.


I wrote up a more detailed expository version of this story at [motivation for sheaves, cohomology and higher stacks](http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/motivation+for+sheaves%2C+cohomology+and+higher+stacks).


