 This may not be an explicit contradiction, but it should be worrying all the same. Realists started out with the ambition of defending a concept of truthlikeness which would enable them to embrace both fallibilism and optimism. But what the likeness theorists seem to have ended up with here is something that suggests a rather unpalatable incommensurability of competing conceptual frameworks. To avoid this, the realist will need to affirm that some conceptual frameworks really are better than others. Some really do “carve reality at the joints” and others don’t. But is that something the realist should be reluctant to affirm?