Contingency (philosophy)
status of propositions that are neither always true nor always false
In logic, contingency is the feature of a statement making it neither necessary nor impossible. Contingency is a fundamental concept of modal logic. Modal logic concerns the manner, or mode, in which statements are true. Contingency is one of three basic modes alongside necessity and impossibility. In modal logic, a contingent statement stands in the modal realm between what is necessary and what is impossible, never crossing into the territory of either status. Contingent and necessary statements form the complete set of possible statements. While this definition is widely accepted, the precise distinction (or lack thereof) between what is contingent and what is necessary has been challenged since antiquity.
Contingency and modal possibility
In logic, a thing is considered to be possible when it is true in at least one possible world. This means there is a way to imagine a world in which a statement is true and in which its truth does not contradict any other truth in that world. If it were impossible, there would be no way to conceive such a world: the truth of any impossible statement must contradict some other fact in that world.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1359069. The Library of Congress control number is sh85031559. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Contingency (philosophy)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.