 Thus construed, Lyons criticizes Psillos’ criterion for essentiality, as being “superfluous, unmotivated, and therefore inappropriate” (2006: 541). Briefly put, his point is that condition 3 “unacceptably overshoots” the realist’s goal, since the absence of an alternative \(H^*\) has “no bearing whatsoever on whether \(H\) itself contributed to, was deployed in, the derivation of a given prediction” (2006: 540). Besides, Lyons states that condition 3 is so vague that it is “simply inapplicable” (2006: 542). According to Mario Alai’s (2021) summary of Lyons’s point, condition 3 doesn’t specify (a) when the alternative hypothesis \(H^*\) must or must not be available, (b) what ‘potentially explanatory etc.’ means and (c) whether \(H'\) and \(A\) must be essential too. In addition; (d) it doesn’t state whether \(H^*\) is allowed to lead to losses of other confirmed predictions and (e) whether \(H^*\) should be consistent with those elements of \(H'\) and \(A\), which, though they are ‘essential’ for other predictions, they are dispensable when it comes to the derivation of the prediction under scrutiny. Based on these points, Lyons suggests that even if realists might hold onto conditions 1 and 2 above, condition 3 has to be abandoned, thereby isolating “the deployment realist’s fundamental insight”, viz., that credit should be attributed to those posits that actually—as opposed to essentially—have been deployed in the derivation of empirical predictions (2006,543). 