  Regarding the famous Sea Battle Argument, which Aristotle presents in De
Interpretatione 9, there has never been a general agreement not only about its
correctness but also, and mainly, about what the argument really is. According
to the most natural reading of the chapter, the argument appeals to a temporal
concept of truth and concludes that not every statement is always either true
or false. However, many of Aristotle's followers and commentators have not
adopted this reading. I believe that it has faced so much resistance for
reasons of hermeneutic charity denying the law of universal bivalence seems to
be overly disruptive to logical orthodoxy the kind of logical orthodoxy
represented by what we now call classical propositional logic, much of which
Aristotle clearly supports in many texts. I intend to show that the
logical-semantic theses that the traditional reading finds in De
Interpretatione 9 are much more conservative than they may seem to be at first
glance. First, I will show that they complement, and do not contradict in any
way, the orthodox definitions of the concepts of truth and statement that
Aristotle advances in other texts. Second, by resorting in an anachronistic
vein to concepts and methods peculiar to contemporary logic, I will show that a
trivalent modal semantics conforming to those theses can be built for a
standard formal language of the classical propositional calculus. It is
remarkable that reasonable concepts of logical truth and logical consequence
that may be defined on the basis of this trivalent modal semantics are
coextensive with their orthodox counterparts, the concepts of tautology and
tautological consequence of classical bivalent and extensional semantics.
