 The goddess reveals to Parmenides, however, the possibility of achieving understanding that does not wander or that is stable and unchanging, precisely because its object is and cannot not be (what it is). The third way of inquiry can never lead to this, and thus it is not presented by the goddess as a path of inquiry for understanding. It directs the inquirer’s attention to things that are (what they are) only contingently or temporarily: they are and then again are not, or they are a certain way and then again are not that way. The problem with this path is not, as too many interpreters have understood it to be, that nothing exists to be discovered along this way. There are innumerably many things that are (and exist) in the manner specified at fr. 6.8–9a (and fr. 8.40–1). However, since their being is merely contingent, Parmenides thinks there can be no stable apprehension of them, no thoughts about them that remain steadfast and do not wander, and thus no true or reliable conviction. According to Parmenides, genuine conviction cannot be found by focusing one’s attention on things that are subject to change. This is why he has the goddess repeatedly characterize the cosmology in the second phase of her revelation as deceptive or untrustworthy. The modal interpretation thus makes it relatively straightforward to understand the presence of the poem’s cosmology. It is an account of the principles, origins, and operation of the world’s mutable population. It is Parmenides’ own account, the best he was able to provide, and one firmly in the tradition of Presocratic cosmology. At the same time, however, Parmenides supposed there was more to the world than all those things that have grown, now are, and will hereafter end (as he describes them in fragment 19). There is also what is (what it is) and cannot not be (what it is).