Accounts of scientific explanation disagree about what’s required for a cause, law, or other fact to be a reason why an event occurs. In short, they disagree about the conditions for explanatory relevance. Nonetheless, most accounts presuppose that claims about explanatory relevance play a descriptive role in tracking reality. By rejecting the need for this descriptivist assumption, I develop an expressivist account of explanatory relevance and explanation: to judge that an answer is explanatory is to express an attitude of being for being satisfied by that answer. I show how expressivism vindicates ordinary scientific discourse about explanation, including claims about the objectivity and mind-independence of explanations. By avoiding commitment to ontic relevance relations, I rehabilitate an irrealist conception of explanation.

科学解释的说法不同意原因、法律或其他事实需要什么才能成为事件发生的原因。简而言之，他们不同意解释相关性的条件。尽管如此，大多数帐户都假定关于解释相关性的主张在跟踪现实中起着描述性作用。通过拒绝对这种描述主义假设的需要，我发展了一种关于解释相关性和解释的表达主义解释：判断一个答案是解释性的，就是表达一种被该答案满足的态度. 我展示了表现主义如何为关于解释的普通科学话语辩护，包括关于解释的客观性和思想独立性的主张。通过避免对本体相关关系的承诺，我恢复了一种非现实主义的解释概念。