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Putnam endorses two seemingly opposite claims about reference and the content of mental states. According to Putnam’s semantic externalism in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1975), reference or intentionality demands that words and mental states bear a relation to the world as it is, independently of our language and thoughts. Meanwhile, according to Putnam’s internal realism in Reason, Truth and History (1981), one cannot think about or refer to an object without making use of a certain conceptual network and entertaining a certain set of beliefs. Is the conjunction of these claims consistent? This paper argues that it is, and indeed corresponds to a core element of Putnam’s thought, since such a conjunction is the sole way to avoid what Putnam calls in 1999 “the antinomy of realism.”