 Widely discussed in the pluralist literature is the nature of the relationship between various available explanations of a given phenomenon. Consider for example the study of health inequalities. Two main levels of explanation are offered by social epidemiology and molecular epidemiology. What is the relationship between these two types of explanation? Is it an instance of “competitive” pluralism or of “compatible” pluralism, in Mitchell’s terminology (1992)? For proponents of “competitive” pluralism, the co-existence of competing explanations is temporary, allowing scientific communities to keep open several lines of research until one of them can be identified as the right one (Beatty 1987; Kitcher 1990). By contrast, compatible pluralism does not consider the existence of alternative types of explanations temporary but reflecting the complexity of multilevel, multicomponent target systems, lending themselves to integration rather than competition (Mitchell 2003, 2009). A more fine-grained typology distinguishes six types of explanatory pluralism covering various kinds of relationships (or lack thereof) between explanations (anything goes pluralism, isolationist pluralism, interactive pluralism, integrative pluralism, temporary pluralism and explanatory reductionism) (Van Bouwel 2014, building on further distinctions developed by Mitchell [2003] and Longino [2013]). More domain specific typologies have also been proposed, such as Marchionni’s (2008) distinction between “weak complementarity” and “strong complementarity” of explanations available on macro and micro levels in the social sciences. To what extent these options are compatible depends, not surprisingly, on the exact content assigned to them.