 According to what we might call an “understanding-first” approach to the relationship, thinking about the epistemology of understanding is indispensable for thinking about what makes for a good explanation. More exactly, because we seem to assess the goodness or badness of an explanation in terms of its ability to generate understanding, understanding is in some sense conceptually prior to, or more basic than, the notion of explanation. Thus intuitions about understanding are often taken to be diagnostic of the goodness (the explanatoriness) of an explanation (Wilkenfeld 2013; cf. Wilkenfeld &amp; Lombrozo 2020), and if we can think of a case where all of the conditions for the theory of explanation are met, but understanding does not result, that is a reason to reject the sufficiency of the conditions (see, e.g., Woodward 2003: 195, in diagnosing Hempel’s view). Similarly, if we have understanding in ways not sanctioned by the theory, that is reason to think the conditions are not necessary. More generally, an advocate of the “understanding-first” approach would likely concur with Paul Humphreys’s claim that: