Putnam critisized logical positivists acounts of the meaning of scientific terms and nature of scientific theories because they were incompatible with minimal scientific realism. However, before discounting antirealism as valud stance he leaned toward it in his internal realist years, the view that epistemic version of truth is the most valid.
Dear Philippos Afxentiou
There are many theses called "scientific realism" and many called "scientific anti-realism." In principle, they refer to the acceptance or rejection of the existence of unobservable objects postulated by scientific theories, and in this sense, this classification is metaphysical or ontological.
On the other hand -I am not talking about Putnam, but about the texts he wrote -, different texts by such an author affirm different things.
But "truth" is a semantic term, which refers -in its most usual meaning, which is the one used by science and natural language- to a relationship called "correspondence" between language with a descriptive function and what it alludes, so it is convenient to treat those topics separately (they are not logically linked).
If one speaks of scientific realism, then there are many positions on the matter, but I believe that any analysis must take into account, on the one hand, the scientific realism assumed by the scientific texts themselves: when a biology book talks about mitochondria or a physics speaks of positrons, they assume the existence of those things beyond language.
Second, the natural language we are using is realistic too, and assumes the scientific realism of science itself (that atoms and viruses exist, for example). And if it is about philosophical arguments about science, things get complicated there, because there are many versions and positions.
However, Putnam's arguments never differentiate between epistemological claims about human knowledge in general and those related to scientific knowledge, which is why I consider his theses are not very useful for the philosophy of science (I don't know for epistemology).
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