 Taken in itself, the observation just described seems completely uncontroversial and not in conflict with traditional approaches to explanation. Indeed, as remarked above writers like Hempel and Salmon explicitly agree that explanation has a pragmatic dimension in the sense just described—in fact, Hempel invokes the role of pragmatic factors at a number of points to address prima-facie counterexamples to the DN model. This suggests that, often at least, what is distinctive about pragmatic approaches to explanation is not just the bare idea that explanation has a “pragmatic dimension” but rather the much stronger claim that the traditional project of constructing a model of explanation pursued by Hempel and others has so far been unsuccessful ( and perhaps is bound to be unsuccessful) and that this is so because pragmatic or contextual factors play a central and ineliminable role in explanation in a way that resists incorporation into models of the traditional sort. On this view, much of what is distinctive about pragmatic accounts is their opposition to traditional accounts and their diagnosis of why such accounts fail—they fail because they omit pragmatic or contextual elements. It will be important to keep this point in mind in what follows because there is a certain tendency among advocates of pragmatic theories to argue as though the superiority of their approach is established simply by the observation that explanation has a pragmatic dimension; instead it seems more appropriate to think that the real issue is whether traditional approaches are inadequate in principle because of their neglect of the pragmatic dimension of explanation.