Categorical Constructions and the Ramsey Property

Abstract

It has become obvious in the recent development that the structural Ramsey property is a categorical property: it depends not only on the choice of objects, but also on the choice of morphisms involved. In this paper we explicitely put the Ramsey property and the dual Ramsey property in the context of categories of finite structures and investigate the invariance of these properties under some standard categorical constructions. We use elementary category theory to generalize some combinatorial results and using the machinery of very basic category theory provide new combinatorial statements (whose formulations do not refer to category-theoretic notions).