  In the modern description of nuclear forces based on chiral effective field
theory, four-nucleon operators with unknown coupling constants appear. These
couplings can be fixed by a fit to the low partial waves of neutron-proton
scattering. We show that the so determined numerical values can be understood
on the basis of phenomenological one-boson-exchange models. We also extract
these values from various modern high accuracy nucleon-nucleon potentials and
demonstrate their consistency and remarkable agreement with the values in the
chiral effective field theory approach. This paves the way for estimating the
low-energy constants of operators with more nucleon fields and/or external
probes.
