Abstract This chapter first describes a number of important respects in which historically sophisticated contemporary scientific realists and instrumentalists have come to agree far more with one another than either does with their classical predecessors. It suggests that their central residual disagreement concerns whether we can reliably specify which elements of our theories will persist indefinitely throughout further scientific inquiry, and that the position we take in this crucial remaining disagreement actually makes a difference to how we should pursue the scientific enterprise itself. It concludes by exploring a further dimension of disagreement concerning the level of abstraction or generality at which the realism debate can be profitably pursued, on which contemporary realists and instrumentalists are united against both the complete generality assumed by their classical counterparts and the radical particularist who sees nothing to be gained by ascending to any level of abstraction or generality above that of individual scientific cases.
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