Ramsey properties of products and pullbacks of categories and the Grothendieck construction

TL;DR

This paper offers purely categorical proofs for key results in structural Ramsey theory, demonstrating that certain constructions preserve the Ramsey property without relying on model-theoretic methods.

Contribution

It generalizes existing results by removing signature restrictions and provides categorical proofs for the preservation of the Ramsey property and degrees.

Findings

Categorical proofs of Ramsey property preservation

Generalization beyond relational structures

Information on Ramsey degrees included

Abstract

In this paper we provide purely categorical proofs of two important results of structural Ramsey theory: the result of M.\ Soki\'c that the free product of Ramsey classes is a Ramsey class and the result of M.\ Bodirsky, M.\Pinsker and T.\ Tsankov that adding constants to the language of a Ramsey class preserves the Ramsey property. The proofs that we present here ignore the model-theoretic background of these statements. Instead, they focus on categorical constructions by which the classes can be constructed, generalizing the original statements along the way. It turns out that the restriction to classes of relational structures, although fundamental for the original proof strategies, is not relevant for the statements themselves. The categorical proofs we present here remove all the restrictions on the signature of first-order structures and provide the information not only about the Ramsey property but also about the Ramsey degrees.