 While this response may seem plausible enough as far as it goes, it does bring out the extent to which much of the work of distinguishing the explanatory from the non-explanatory in van Fraassen’s account comes from a very general appeal to what is accepted as legitimate background information in current science. Put differently, this raises the worry that once one moves beyond van Fraassen’s formal machinery concerning questions and answers (which van Fraassen himself acknowledges is relatively unconstraining), one is left with an account according to which a scientific explanation is simply any explanation employing claims from current science and a currently scientifically approved relevance relation. Even if otherwise unexceptionable, this proposal is, if not exactly trivial, at least rather deflationary—it provides much less than many have hoped for from a theory of explanation. In particular, in cases (of which there are many examples) in which there is an ongoing argument or dispute in some area of science not about whether some proposed theory or model is true but rather about whether it explains some phenomenon, it is not easy to see how the proposal even purports to provide guidance. On the other hand, the obvious rejoinder that might be made on van Fraassen’s behalf is that no more ambitious treatment that would satisfy the expectations associated with more traditional accounts of explanation (including a demarcation of candidate explanations into those that are “correct” and “incorrect”) is possible—a theory like van Fraassen’s is as good as it gets. If there is no defensible theory of explanation embodying a non-trivially constraining relevance relation, it cannot be a good criticism of van Fraassen’s theory that he fails to provide this.