Outward compactness

Abstract

We introduce and study a new type of compactness principle for strong logics that, roughly speaking, infers the consistency of a theory from the consistency of its small fragments in certain outer models of the set-theoretic universe. We refer to this type of compactness property as outward compactness, and we show that instances of this type of principle for second-order logic can be used to characterize various large cardinal notions between measurability and extendibility, directly generalizing a classical result of Magidor that characterizes extendible cardinals as the strong compactness cardinals of second-order logic. In addition, we generalize a result of Makowsky that shows that Vop\v{e}nka's Principle is equivalent to the existence of compactness cardinals for all abstract logics by characterizing the principle "Ord is Woodin" through outward compactness properties of abstract logics.