External cofinalities and the antichain condition in partial orders

Does every partial order of singular cofinality λ have an antichain of size cf ( λ ) ? This is the Singular Cofinality Conjecture. M. Pouzet proved [M. Pouzet, Parties cofinales des ordres partiels ne contenant pas d’antichaines infinies, 1980, preprint] that there must be an infinite antichain. When cf ( λ ) is uncountable, the positive answer is only consistently true, but unknown in ZFC. In this note we investigate this question from the purely set-theoretic point of view. On the way, we answer a question of Milner and Pouzet from [E.C. Milner, M. Pouzet, Posets with singular cofinality, 1997, preprint].