In order to appreciate Peter Achinstein's Law and Explanation: An Essay in the Philosophy of Science, (1), it is necessary to recognize that the author accepts at

language without concern for the arbitrary restraints of more formalistic methods. The result is a book that is as unusual for what it excludes as it is for the approach that it advocates; for, although focused upon the concepts of law, explanation, and inference, it provides no formal analysis of the logical structure of law statements, of the distinctive features of statistical as opposed to universal laws, of the logical properties of explanations of singular events invoking laws of either kind, of the concept of causality or the concept of causal relevance, of any concept of probability, physical or otherwise, of the distinctive features of predictions as opposed to explanations (if, indeed, there are any), of the logical characteristics of inductive or deductive inference, or of any problems related to the justification of induction. Indeed, with respect to each of these topics, this book says virtually nothing at all. What it does provide, by contrast, is an elaborate characterization, first, of what "one typically finds scientists referring to as laws" ([1], p. viii), second, of what it means "to say that someone would attempt to explain something q by citing some