 One of the most influential recent pragmatic accounts of explanation is associated with constructive  empiricism.[12]  This is the thesis, defended by Bas van Fraassen in his 1980 book, The Scientific Image, that the aim of science (or at least “pure” science) is the construction of theories that are “empirically adequate” (that is, that yield a true or correct description of observables) and not, as scientific realists suppose, theories that aim to tell literally true stories about unobservables. Relatedly, “acceptance” of a theory involves only the belief that it is empirically adequate (van Fraassen 1980: 12). van Fraassen’s account of explanation, which is laid out in several articles and, most fully, in Chapter Six of his book, is meant to fit with this overall conception of science: it is a conception according to which explanation per se is not an epistemic aim of “pure” science (empirical adequacy is the only such aim), but rather a “pragmatic” virtue, having to do with the “application” of science. (Note that the application of science is arguably a matter of pragmatics1. However, the idea that explanation has to do with the application of science is used to motivate the adoption of a pragmatic2 theory of explanation. We thus have an elision of the two notions of “pragmatic” distinguished above.) According to van Fraassen, because explanation is a merely pragmatic virtue, a concern with explanation is not something that can require scientists to move beyond belief in the empirical adequacy of their theories to belief in the literal truth of claims about unobservable entities.