Conservative translations (Q5935991)

The authors consider a logic to be a set equipped with a consequence relation, and a translation between logics to be a mapping between the underlying sets which preserves consequences. A translation is said to be conservative if it reflects consequences as well as preserving them. A large part of the paper is devoted to determining the extent to which various notions of translation between logics in the existing literature can be fitted into this scheme. However, the authors' main purpose is to investigate the categorical properties of the category of logics and (conservative) translations between them. For arbitrary translations, one obtains a topological category in the technical sense, so its properties are easily described. The authors assert that the non-full subcategory of conservative translations is closed under arbitrary coproducts, equalizers and coequalizers; however, for coequalizers this assertion is easily seen to be false.