Is the reality we are familiar with independent of our thinking and cognition? Realism answers this question positively, while the various forms of antirealism provide a negative response. However, the discussion between realists and antirealists is based on a misunderstanding of the underlying problem. This problem does not lie in the independence of reality from thought, but in our mental access to it: How can we gain knowledge about a reality that is independent of cognition and thought, and how can we refer to it in our thinking at all? A contextualist rejection of skepticism and a novel normative disjunctive conception of theoretical intentionality aim to demonstrate that the mental accessibility of reality is not called into question by its independence from thought. The result is an indirect defense of direct access to reality.