Roche and Sober (2013; 2014; 2017; 2019) have offered an important new argument that explanatoriness lacks confirmatory significance. My aim in this paper is not only to contend that their argument fails to show that in confirmation ‘there is nothing special about explanatoriness’ (Roche & Sober, 2017: 589), but also to reveal what is special confirmationwise about explanatoriness. I will argue that much of the heavy work in Roche and Sober's argument is done by the dichotomy into which they carve up the philosophical options: either explanatory considerations per se are confirmatorily relevant or they acquire whatever confirmatory significance they may possess only by way of background beliefs and so no differently from non-explanatory considerations. I will argue that this is a false dichotomy: Explanatoriness per se can have confirmatory relevance even while explanatory considerations acquire their confirmatory relevance only through background opinions. Furthermore, there is ‘something special’ about the background opinions concerning explanations that allow explanatoriness in itself to have confirmatory impact. Unlike other sorts of background, having some background opinions expressly about explanations is indispensable to being an observer at all.

中文翻译：

---

否认解释性在确认中的任何作用的错误二分法

Roche 和 Sober (2013; 2014; 2017; 2019) 提出了一个重要的新论点，即解释性缺乏证实意义。我在本文中的目的不仅是要争辩说他们的论点未能证明在确认中“解释性没有什么特别之处”（Roche & Sober，2017：589），而且还揭示了解释性的特殊确认性。我将争辩说，Roche 和 Sober 的论证中的大部分繁重工作都是通过二分法完成的，他们将哲学选项划分为二分法：要么解释性考虑本身是确证相关的，要么它们仅通过背景获得可能具有的任何确证意义信念，因此与非解释性考虑没有什么不同。我会争辩说这是一个错误的二分法：解释性本身可以具有确认相关性，即使解释性考虑仅通过背景意见获得确认相关性。此外，关于允许解释性本身具有证实性影响的解释的背景意见有一些“特殊之处”。与其他类型的背景不同，对解释有一些明确的背景意见对于成为观察者来说是必不可少的。