ABSTRACT
Arthur Fine has defended a neutral stance in the scientific realism debate. He has famously called his position the ‘natural ontological attitude’ (NOA). Fine’s claim is that both realist and anti-realist approaches are ‘unnatural attitudes’ to science, extraneous attachments to the body of science rather than its natural garb (see Fine 1986a). But Fine’s own ‘natural attitude’ to science is not unproblematic. A point that has repeatedly been made is that Fine’s NOA is inherently unstable: under close inspection, it collapses either to realism or to its rivals. Van Fraassen (1985:246), for instance, thinks that, ‘with minor modifications’, NOA would be compatible with constructive empiricism, and Devitt (1991:45) wonders how NOA differs from his own understanding of realism.
