Most of the papers in this special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica are based on the presentations at the international workshop “Practical Realism —Towards a Realistic Account of Science” held at the University of Tartu, 15-17 June, 2011. e workshop was organised by the Chair of Philosophy of Science in the framework of a research project supported by the Estonian Science Foundation’s grant-system (grant no 7946, 2009-2012, grant holder, Professor Rein Vihalemm). e grant-project entitled “Constructive realism in the conception ofmodels-based scientic theory” initially tackled the concept of scientic theory and models in the new situation of contemporary philosophy of science, which can be characterised by the focus shiing away from the theory because it has been recognised as an unjustiably narrow orientation on theoretical physics only, at the same time neglecting the research of a more general issue of “how science actually works”. As a result of our research, we suggest a solution to the problemvia developing a version ofmodel-based constructive realismwe call practical realismwhich exhibits clear advantages over other constructivist approaches, especially over constructive empiricism and “radical” social constructivism. For the dierent members of our research group, the specic research areas have been diverse extending from physics (two theoretical physicists have been participating in our team) and chemistry to social researches and humanities. In our previous publications we have shown that for understanding the real practice of science, it is appropriate to adopt practical realism as the philosophical point of departure. Practical realism has been characterised