This paper responds to Ronald Allen and Michael Pardo's essay, “Relative Plausibility and its Critics.” In short, Profs. Allen and Pardo succeed on one front but fail on another. They succeed in demonstrating that “probabilism” is not a conceptually or phenomenologically convincing model of how human fact-finders in the real world carry out their task. They fail, however, in demonstrating that probabilism is inadequate as an idealized model of human fact-finding – and to that extent, their analysis falls short of establishing the abstract primacy of “explanationism,” even if it clarifies the latter's content and (limited) utility.
