 This is an area where work on laws needs to be done. Armstrong and Dretske make substantive claims on what can and can’t be instance confirmed: roughly, Humean laws can’t, laws-as-universals can. But, at the very least, these claims cannot be quite right. Humean laws can’t? As the discussion above illustrates, Sober, Lange and others have argued that even generalizations known to be accidental can be confirmed by their instances. Dretske and Armstrong need some plausible and suitably strong premise connecting lawhood to confirmability and it is not clear that there is one to be had. Here is the basic problem: As many authors have noticed (e.g., Sober 1988, 98; van Fraassen 1987, 255), the confirmation of a hypothesis or its unexamined instances will always be sensitive to what background beliefs are in place. So much so that, with background beliefs of the right sort, just about anything can be confirmed irrespective of its status as a law or whether it is lawlike. Thus, stating a plausible principle describing the connection between laws and the problem of induction will be difficult.