Title: One way the ways the world could have been can’t be

Abstract: Suppose we are contingentists and accept two commonly endorsed modal principles about propositions: first, that a proposition must exist to be true and, second, that a proposition expressed by a sentence featuring a term depends for its existence on the referent of that term. What do we then have to say about possible worlds, i.e., the ways, or representations of the ways, the world could have been? Here, I argue that the contingentist must plausibly accept that possible worlds are themselves contingent entities. I then develop a contingentist model theory to model this conception of possible worlds and outline a series of negative results. First, I show that the contingentist cannot accept that propositions true in all worlds are metaphysically necessary. Second, I show that if possibility is just truth at some possible world, then this kind of contingentism collapses into necessitism. Finally, I show that the contingentist can only accept even a weak connection between propositions, worlds and possibility if they allow for distinctions between ways the world could be which, by the contingentist’s own lights, don’t make any sense.