 The ‘Vickers-Alai’ refinement of the divide et impera move has not been uncontested. It has been criticized on principled grounds, as well as for not being sufficient in dealing with PI-style challenges. For instance, Dean Peters (2014) argues inter alia that Vickers’ criterion for essentiality cannot account for the unificatory aspect of scientific theorizing, whereas Florian Boge (2021) and Dana Tulodziecki (2021) have provided new historical counterexamples—within the field of nuclear physics and phychometry, and the 19th century miasma theory of disease, respectively—that cannot be handled, or so it is argued, by the ‘Vickers-Alai’ criterion. 