"Might" is not "is": storing what you actually said (Foundations, part 5)
Part 5 of Foundations: modality, negation, and the quiet ways systems distort what you told them.
Here's a failure so common it's almost invisible. You tell your assistant "I might move to Denver next year." Months later you ask where you live, and somewhere in the machinery your hedge has hardened into a fact: user is moving to Denver. Nothing lied, exactly. The representation just had no place to keep the might, so the might evaporated.
Language is full of these little force-carrying words — modals (might, must, should, can, may), negation (not, never, no longer), conditionals (if, unless). And they're not decoration; they're the commitment level of the claim. Logicians and linguists took them seriously long ago: modal logic from C.I. Lewis through Kripke's possible-world semantics gave necessity and possibility a formal home, and Angelika Kratzer showed how natural-language modals systematically express flavors of commitment — possibility, obligation, ability, permission. This is settled science about what sentences claim. Most memory systems throw it away at the door.
The distortion catalog
Drop these markers and every loss is a truth distortion, not a lost nuance:
- Modality collapse: "might visit Paris" stored as "visits Paris." Possibility promoted to fact.
- Negation blindness: "the deal did not close" retrieved as support for "did the deal close?" — because minus the not, they're nearly the same string. That's part 1's similarity problem at its sharpest.
- Ability isn't action: "can access the server" is not "accesses the server." "May leave early on Fridays" is a permission, not a schedule.
- Hedge laundering: a chain of systems each rounding "reportedly," "planned," "expected" a little closer to fact, until a rumor is a record.
The fix is representational, not clever
We store force alongside content. A claim's polarity (asserted or negated) and its modal class (necessity, possibility, ability, permission, volition) are part of the stored structure — as inseparable from the fact as its subject. Then the question side respects them: "where do I live?" gets answered from asserted facts, never from possibilities. "Was I considering Denver?" finds the might on purpose. And when a hedged claim is all there is, the answer keeps the hedge: you said you might.
Same discipline for reported speech — "Dana said the launch slipped" is a fact about Dana's claim, not about the launch — and for questions inside statements: "he asked whether it shipped" asserts an asking, not a shipping. Who committed to what is exactly the kind of thing a memory exists to keep straight.
Notice what we're not doing: reasoning about possibility. That's the language model's job, upstairs. The memory's job is simpler and harder — preserve the commitment level of what was actually said, so whoever reasons later reasons from what you meant. Fidelity first. Cleverness can rent the space above it.