Scientific realists defend the proposition that successful scientific theories in the mature sciences should be regarded as at least approximately true because that provides the best explanation of the fact that scientists use such theories successfully. Two important types of arguments against scientific realism are then considered. The historical argument appeals to the fact that seemingly successful theories have in the past turned out to be not even approximately true. The empiricist argument holds that because scientific realists believe claims about things that can never be observed, they violate the scientific commitment to subject claims to empirical assessment. Responses on behalf of scientific realism are considered. The chapter concludes by surveying engagements with realism in science that depart from the dialectic just sketched. These include considerations based on experimentation and experimental practice, varieties of structural realism, and perspectival realism.

This chapter clarifies how for Kant conforming our desire for happiness to the demands of morality leads to moral Glaube and the postulates of God’s existence and the soul’s immortality. I show that Kant’s conception of moral Glaube can be approached from both an anti-realist and a realist perspective. According to the former, moral Glaube is speculative reason’s “presupposition” of the objects of these Ideas in order to either avoid its own inner contradictions or to help one maintain one’s moral disposition. It is anti-realist in spirit because the assumptions that reason makes may have nothing to do with how things are in reality. However, if closer attention is paid to Kant’s neglected notion of practical cognition additional evidence becomes available for supporting an understanding of Kant as a realist with respect to moral Glaube and for explaining why the anti-realist interpretations do not adequately capture Kant’s view.

This essay argues that despite Quine and Kuhn’s reputation for bringing to a close the era of Carnap and logical empiricism as the dominating philosophy of science, Carnap, Quine, and Kuhn all share in rejecting traditional realist and anti-realist analyses of ontology. They all reject a version of what Putnam called metaphysical realism and then also resist making the move to an equally extra-scientific anti-realist position. For all of them, science itself is to be the final arbiter of what there is.

I argue that part of Kuhn's legacy to philosophy of science is the problem of theory change. This has had a profound impact on the realism/anti-realism debates since the early 1980s.