ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the willingness of fictionalistic philosophies to grant that certain portions of science are useful and, moreover, sensitive to observational test, though not literally significant. Explanation has been construed as a matter of subsuming particulars under laws, and has been taken widely as requiring formulation in cognitively significant terms. Since explanation involves laws, analyzing confirmation promises, further, to illuminate the idea of explanation. Further, since a lawlike generalization is confirmed by its known instances and itself applies to further instances, these known instances simultaneously support the generalization and an indefinite number of posits besides. Significance would thus seem to be not merely a function of sensitivity to observational test, construed as an independent criterion of confirmability. An analysis of confirmation thus seems likely to illuminate explanations as well as posits and judgments of hypothetical cases, for all these seem to involve lawlike generalizations.
