Icard's 2023 taxonomy crosses source Honesty with content Truth to yield nine named message types, from information to objective lie

intelligence-tradecraftepistemicssource-evaluationformal-logicadmiralty-codetaxonomyprimary-source-verification

The "nine categorizations" that the vault's existing note already knew about — via Kelly et al.'s (2025) gloss, itself a citation of a citation — trace to a specific, named scheme: a 3×3 taxonomy crossing source Honesty (Honest / Imprecise / Dishonest) with content Truth (True / Indeterminate / False). Icard's 2024 dynamic-logic paper reproduces this scheme, attributed to his own earlier work (reference [5], Icard 2023), as its Table 6, captioned "The Descriptive Taxonomy of Intelligence Messages presented in [5]." The paper's own axis names are "Honesty of the Source" and "Truth of the Content," and the nine resulting cells are named, not merely numbered:

The cell numbering is not the ranking. Icard orders the nine "qualitatively from best to worse" separately, as t1 > t5 > t7 > t2 > t9 > t3 > t8 > t6 > t4 — that is, information best and objective lie worst, with omission (an imprecise source telling a true content) ranking above misinformation (an honest source conveying a false one). The middle column is the vagueness column: t9 is "a mixed case in which both the content and source are vague."

This taxonomy is a distinct formal object from Icard's 2024 dynamic logic — a static 3×3 grid rather than a dynamic-update mechanism — even though both are cited together by Kelly et al. as "Icard (2023, 2024)." The taxonomy is the older, source-of-the-numbers half of that joint citation; the dynamic logic is the newer, mechanism half.

The reproduction read here is one hop closer to Icard's own words than the vault previously had (a self-citation within Icard's own later paper, rather than Kelly et al.'s secondhand gloss of it), but it is still not Icard's 2023 Intellectica article itself — see question-verify-icard-2023-taxonomy-primary.

Update 2026-08-09: flag lifted. The 2023 Intellectica original was read directly (HAL self-archive, full text, not sampled) and its own Table 8 — captioned "A Descriptive Taxonomy of Intelligence Messages" — carries the identical nine cells, t1–t9 numbering, and axis definitions as the 2024 paper's Table 6. The [unverified-mechanism] flag is lifted; question-verify-icard-2023-taxonomy-primary is now answered. One asterisk survives the check: the 2024 paper's qualitative ranking of all nine types "from best to worse" does not appear anywhere in the 2023 original — it is new material Icard added alongside the reproduced table, not part of the reproduction. See claim-icard-2024-ranking-of-nine-message-types-is-new-material-not-in-2023-original.