 Hardly anyone nowadays would want to subscribe to a conception of truth that posits a necessary connection between explanatory force and truth—for instance, because it stipulates explanatory superiority to be necessary for truth. As a result, a priori defenses of abduction seem out of the question. Indeed, all defenses that have been given so far are of an empirical nature in that they appeal to data that supposedly support the claim that (in some form) abduction is a reliable rule of inference.