Falsehood and Impossibility Are Different Directions in an AI's Representation of Language

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.12852v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language can describe states of affairs that are false and states of affairs that could not be the case at all. Whether an AI model internally distinguishes these failures remains unclear. I report an exploratory activation study of the multimodal open-weight model Gemma 3 4B IT using 85 prompts from 17 philosophical families and a topic-matched modality set of 15 topics, each expressed as a truth, contingent falsehood, improbable claim, semant