The countable Telescope Conjecture for module categories

By the Telescope Conjecture for Module Categories, we mean the following claim: "Let R be any ring and (A, B) be a hereditary cotorsion pair in Mod-R with A and B closed under direct limits. Then (A, B) is of finite type." We prove a modification of this conjecture with the word 'finite' replaced by 'countable.' We show that a hereditary cotorsion pair (A, B) of modules over an arbitrary ring R is generated by a set of strongly countably presented modules provided that B is closed under unions of well-ordered chains. We also characterize the modules in B and the countably presented modules in A in terms of morphisms between finitely presented modules, and show that (A, B) is cogenerated by a single pure-injective module provided that A is closed under direct limits. Then we move our attention to strong analogies between cotorsion pairs in module categories and localizing pairs in compactly generated triangulated categories. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.