 What claims are being made in and about these stories? Are we to assume that one of them is literally true? Or what are we to infer from their falsity (if they are historically inaccurate)? Does it follow that property is illegitimate? A number of philosophers have suggested recently that a genealogy can make an important contribution to our understanding of a phenomenon even when it is not literally true: Bernard Williams (2002) has suggested this about language and the emergence of truth-telling, following Edward Craig (1990)’s genealogical account of our possession of the concept of knowledge. Robert Nozick has also discussed the value of what he calls ‘potential explanations’—stories that would explain how something happened if certain things were the case (some of which in fact are not the case): ‘To see how in principle, a whole realm could fundamentally be explained greatly increases our understanding of the realm…We learn much by seeing how the state could have arisen, even if it didn’t arise that way’ (Nozick 1974, pp. 8–9).