One cannot be just a little bit realist

Hilary Putnam and Bas C. van Fraassen have been two pivotal figures in the scientific realism debate in the second half of the twentieth century. Their initial perspectives were antithetical – defining an archetypical scientific realist position (Putnam) and a major empiricisminspired alternative to scientific realism (van Fraassen). But as the years (and the philosophical debates) went on, there have been important lines of convergence in the stances of these two thinkers, mostly motivated by an increasing flirtation with pragmatism and by a growing disdain towards metaphysics. Putnam’s views went through two major turns, in a philosophical journey he aptly described as taking him ‘from realism back to realism’ (1994, 494). Being an archscientific realist in the 1960s and the early 1970s, he moved to a trenchant critique of metaphysical realism and the adoption of a verificationist‘internalist’ approach (what he called pragmatic or internal realism), which he upheld roughly until the end of the twentieth century. Then he adopted a direct realist outlook, what