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.