Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Using ideas from Shelah's recent proof that a completely separable maximal almost disjoint family exists when $c<{{\aleph }_{\omega }}$, we construct a weakly tight family under the hypothesis $\mathfrak{s}\le \mathfrak{b}<{{\aleph }_{\omega }}$. The case when $\mathfrak{s}<\mathfrak{b}$ is handled in ZFC and does not require $\mathfrak{b}<{{\aleph }_{\omega }}$, while an additional PCF type hypothesis, which holds when $\mathfrak{b}<{{\aleph }_{\omega }}$ is used to treat the case $\mathfrak{s}=\mathfrak{b}$. The notion of a weakly tight family is a natural weakening of the well-studied notion of a Cohen indestructible maximal almost disjoint family. It was introduced by Hrušák and García Ferreira [8], who applied it to the Katétov order on almost disjoint families.