The 'realist turn' in the philosophy of science occurred in the 1970s and marked a shift from empiricist views concerning scientific theories and their relation to the world to realist ones. It was associated with what came to be known as the explanationist defense of realism, viz., the strategy of showing that the basic realist tenets offer the best explanation of the empirical and predictive successes of scientific theories. It was motivated by a move from verification and issues in semantics (how do theoretical terms get their meaning?) to abduction (aka inference to the best explanation) and issues in epistemology (do we have reasons to take scientific theories, literally understood, as truthlike?). Realism initiated an era of epistemic optimism: science is in the truth-business. Soon enough however, this optimistic stance was challenged by rival views which aimed to show that, even after the collapse of instrumentalism, realism is not the only game in town concerning science (this was the key objective of van Fraassen's (1980) constructive empiricism); or that realism is at odds with the history of science and, in particular, with a track record of false and abandoned, but otherwise empirically successful, theories (this was Mary Hesse's and Larry Laudan's historical induction). In reply to the historical challenge, realists became more selective in what they are realists about. This chapter offers a narrative of the basic twists and turns of the realism debate after the realist turn. I will start with what preceded and initiated the turn, viz., instrumentalist construals of scientific theories. I will then move on to discuss the basic lines of development of the realist stance to science, focusing on one of its main challenges: the historical challenge. 2. Semantic realism The current phase of the scientific realism debate-what I call the epistemic phasestarted in the middle 1960s and was based on an important consensus, viz., semantic realism. This is the view that the vocabulary of scientific theories should be treated in a uniform way on the basis of standard referential semantics. In the early 1950s, the

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