On van Fraassen, IBE and the essence of the controversy between realism and antirealism in the philosophy of science, again

This paper represents a counterreply to “A rejoinder to Alessio Gava’s ‘Van Fraassen, a inferência da melhor explicação e a Matrix realista’”, by Minikoski and Rodrigues da Silva, released in Problemata (v. 12, n. 2, 2021). The authors originally published an essay in the same journal, “Van Fraassen and inference to the best explanation” (2016), the object of critic - ‘friendly and gentle’ - in a work of mine that also appeared in Problemata, in 2019. In this paper I will show that, even when the subject matter is the inference to the best explanation, realists and antirealists end up debating about the same old topics, that represent the essence of the controversy between the two philosophical stances.