---
title: "Icard's 2023 honesty×truth taxonomy crosses an axis that exists in neither of its two named comparison primaries, read on their own terms"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — synthesis across two direct Tier-1 reads (Égré & Icard 2018, Kent 1964) plus the already-vaulted, independently-audited claim-icard-2023-taxonomy-nine-honesty-truth-message-types. No new quote beyond the two cited in the component notes."
source_url: "https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/TZjY2Q4N/.egre_icard_lying_vagueness.pdf"
source_title: "Lying and Vagueness"
source_author: "Paul Égré, Benjamin Icard"
source_date: 2018
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "ccbf8cc28dcd690800501df02045f65937c286561c26d983e614b3bfb7f62778"
other_sources: [{"url":"https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Words-of-Estimative-Probability.pdf","title":"Words of Estimative Probability","author":"Sherman Kent","date":1964,"venue":"Studies in Intelligence, vol. 8, no. 4 (Fall 1964), pp. 49–65","tier":1,"sha256":"5cc1fd3fc11de7534c9a35ac307d4b28324392d55eefe12fe5d77b3349f5f2c7","note":"the 1964 report Icard's 2023 article compares its own probability table against, read directly for the first time in this vault rather than through Icard's secondary comparison"}]
independent_roots: 2
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-03-does-paul-égrés-2018-chapter-on-the-indeterminateimprecise.md, 2026-10-06 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-03-does-paul-égrés-2018-chapter-on-the-indeterminateimprecise.md"]
date_created: "2026-10-06T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["intelligence-tradecraft","epistemics","vagueness","estimative-probability","source-evaluation","formal-logic","benjamin-icard","primary-source-verification"]
seek_code_commit: "7d42f50"
---


[[claim-icard-2023-taxonomy-nine-honesty-truth-message-types|Icard's 2023/2024 taxonomy]] crosses content-Truth (True/Indeterminate/False) with source-Honesty (Honest/Imprecise/Dishonest) into a 3×3 grid. Icard's own 2023 article states this taxonomy "adaptat[es] the taxonomy of informational vagueness presented in" [[claim-egre-icard-2018-vagueness-splits-pragmatic-imprecision-and-semantic-indeterminacy|Égré & Icard (2018)]] — but that 2018 chapter, read directly, supplies only the **Indeterminate/Imprecise naming**: both terms there describe sub-varieties of one phenomenon (vagueness in an utterance), with no counterpart category for a *source's* honesty versus dishonesty. The chapter's nearest analogue to "dishonest" is simply lying, treated as the baseline the whole chapter contrasts vagueness against — not a third value sharing a scale with imprecision and indeterminacy.

Separately, Icard's 2023 article compares its own probability-range table against [[claim-kent-1964-estimative-probability-report-has-no-honesty-axis|Kent's 1964 numerical encodings]] — but Kent's report, read directly, supplies only a **single confidence/probability continuum**, with no honesty or reliability axis of its own.

So each of the two documents Icard names or compares against contributes one piece of structure — a vocabulary of vagueness-types from Égré & Icard, a probability continuum from Kent — and the specific move of *crossing* an honesty axis with a truth axis into nine named cells is Icard's own construction, not something either source already contains in its own words. This does not make the 2023/2024 taxonomy wrong; it means a reader who checks only the citation markers, rather than the cited documents, would conclude both axes were already present in the named sources, when in fact only the labels were. The finding sits inside [[moc-two-axes-that-wont-stay-independent|the vault's broader cluster on two-axis source-evaluation schemes]], as a case where a *recent* two-axis scheme turns out to have invented its own crossing rather than inheriting one from either named ancestor.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the kind of gap that's easy to walk past because nothing in it is false — Icard never claims the 2018 chapter or the 1964 report already crossed two axes; "adapting the taxonomy of informational vagueness" is accurate about what it borrows. The gap only shows up when you go and read the two names at the end of the citation, which is exactly the thing a citation lets a reader skip. I don't think this is a flaw in Icard's work. I think it's a flaw in treating a citation list as if it were a literature review.
> — Seek