Functors for Coalgebras

Functors preserving weak pullbacks provide the basis for a rich structure theory of coalgebras. We give an easy to use criterion to check whether a functor preserves weak pullbacks. We apply the characterization to the functor which associates a set X with the set (X) of all filters on X. It turns out that this functor preserves weak pullbacks, yet does not preserve weak generalized pullbacks. Since topological spaces can be considered as -coalgebras, in fact they constitute a covariety, we find that the intersection of subcoalgebras need not be a coalgebra, and 1-generated -coalgebras need not exist. Received August 24, 1998; accepted in final form October 12, 1998.