Bicategories, Biequivalence, and Bi-Interpretability

Abstract: We make explicit the correspondence between syntax and syntactic categories for coherent first-order logic, providing a categorical characterization of bi-interpretability. This is done by creating a biequivalence between a bicategory of coherent theories and the (strict) bicategory of coherent categories. While the biequivalence concerns the stronger equality-preserving bi-interpretability, we use it to obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for two theories to be bi-interpretable in general, by relating the exact completions of their syntactic categories. These results extend analogously to familiar fragments of first-order logic, thereby clarifying the long-intuited relation between logical syntax and syntactic categories.