 Alai claims that substituting condition 3′ for condition 3 is an improvement of the divide et impera move, for not only does condition 3′ perform the task that Psillos had in mind, but also escapes from Lyons’ criticisms (2021: 188). To begin with, condition 3′ is said not to suffer from the (alleged) vagueness of condition 3, for according to Alai: (a) there is no question about when the alternative \(H^*\) is available; (b) there is no need to specify what ‘explanatory’ means; and (c) it is not required that \(H'\) and \(A\) are also essential. In addition, (d) condition 3′ allows that \(H^*\) may lead to losses of other confirmed predictions and (e), since 3′ excludes only hypotheses \(H^*\) which are entailed by \(H\), \(H^*\) are ipso facto consistent with \(H'\) and \(A\).