Realist justifications of scientific rationality are anchored in the claim that scientific knowledge aspires to discover the truth about how things really are. Scientific methodology is adopted to the extent that it proves an effective method of attaining the truth, and all other goals to which scientific knowledge may aspire are ultimately dependent upon how things really are. These philosophical anti-realists saw the realist defense of rationality as tantamount to handing the sociologists victory. The philosophical anti-realists are today's descendants of older empiricists, and they perceive themselves as such. Realists see philosophical anti-realists as making the classical pragmatists' blunder of confusing the process by which human inquiry leads to a particular belief as rational to accept with what makes that belief acceptable.
Realists see scientific inquiry as discovery while anti-realists sees it as invention.
Defenders of scientific realism are by no means all agreed upon a single doctrine. Entity realists tend to be naturalists and to emphasize experiment over theory as the road to discovery.