 Despite their many differences, the accounts of Hempel (focusing now on just the DN rather than the IS model), Salmon, Kitcher, and others discussed above, largely share a common overall conception of what the project of constructing a theory of explanation should involve and (to a considerable extent) what criteria such a theory should satisfy if it is to be successful. “Pragmatic” theories of explanation depart from this consensus in important respects. Let us say that a theory of explanation contains “pragmatic” elements if (i) according to the theory, those elements require irreducible reference to facts about the interests, beliefs or other features of the psychology of those providing or receiving the explanation and/or (ii) irreducible reference to the “context” in which the explanation occurs. (For what this means, see below.) Although the writers discussed above agree that pragmatic elements play some role in the activity of giving and receiving explanations, they assume that there is a non-pragmatic core to the notion of explanation, which it is the central task of a theory of explanation to capture. That is, it is assumed that this core notion can be specified without reference to psychological features of explainers or their audiences and with reference to non-contextual features that are sufficiently general, abstract and “structural,” in the sense that they hold across a range of explanations with different contents and across a range of different contexts. Relations like deductive entailment or statistical relevance are examples of candidates for such “structural” relationships. In addition, these writers see the goal of a theory of explanation, as capturing the notion of a correct explanation, as opposed to the notion of an explanation’s being considered explanatory by a particular audience or not, a matter which presumably depends on such considerations as whether the audience understands the terms in which the explanation is framed. (In this sense, “correctness” requires (at least) that the explanans be true or “well-confirmed” and that the explanans stands in the right relationship to the explanandum.) Finally, as noted in the Introduction to this entry, writers in this tradition have not had the goal of capturing all the various ways in which the word “explanation” is used in ordinary English. They have instead focused on a much more restricted class of examples in which what is of interest is (something like) explaining “why” some outcome or general phenomenon occurred, as opposed to explaining, e.g., the meaning of a word or how to solve a differential equation. The motivation for this restriction is simply the judgment that an interesting and non-trivial theory is more likely to emerge if it is restricted in scope in this way. For ease of reference, let us call this the “traditional” conception of the task of a theory of explanation.