ABSTRACT
Science has long claimed to discover the relations among the natural kinds in the universe that exist independently of our minds and ways of coping. Today, most philosophers adopt an antirealism that consists in rejecting this thesis. Contemporary antirealists argue that the independence thesis is not just false but incoherent. Thus, these antirealists say they are as realist as it makes sense to be. Such deflationary realists, as I shall call them, claim that the objects studied by science are just as real as the baseballs, stones, and trees we encounter with our everyday coping practices, and no more.1 In contrast to deflationary realism, I shall defend a robust realism that argues that the independence claim makes sense, that science can in principle give us access to the functional components of the universe as they are in themselves2 in distinction from how they appear to us on the basis of our daily concerns, our sensory capacities, and even our way of making things intelligible.3
