Depending on how one chooses to define ‘
category’, one
could have that the
morphisms of
Cop are the same as those of
C. However, in general this is not guaranteed and should not be assumed.
(My
category theory instructor says that the notion of equality is ‘evil’ and that asking whether
C and
Cop have “the same
morphisms” makes him uncomfortable)
At the very
least, it is somewhat convenient to consider
Mor(C) and
Mor(Cop) to be
disjoint, because then we can write expressions like
−∘f without having to specify in which
category the composition is being performed!
To give a downright definition, we may say the following. If It’s worth noting that forming the opposite
category is
purely syntactic; no “work” is done. For instance, take a
morphism f:R→N in
Set. This is a
function from
R to
N. The
morphism fop then goes from
N to
R in
Setop. However, it would be incorrect to conclude that
fop represents a
function from
N to
R; although the source and target have been reversed, we have not constructed anything new:
fop is simply a ‘new view’ on the same
function f.