The paper is written in continuation of the discussion on the realistic turn in modern philosophy of science. It is noted that the problem of preserving a person's ability to culture-forming differences - between reality and illusion, truth and falsehood in legal science is associated with the distinction between justice and injustice. It offers a critical evaluation of relativistic tendencies in legal science, under the influence of which the law acquires a voluntaristic nature and is understood as a "right of the strong", that leads to blurring the boundaries between legal and political tradition. The problem of truth in legal science is considered through the example of two conceptions of truth developed in the criminal procedure doctrine - objective truth and legal (formal) truth, behind each of which there is a certain idea of reality and the possibilities of its cognition - realistic and relativistic, respectively. The absence of differences between the truth of the empirical proposal about the facts and its evidence in the concept of legal truth leads to the fact that the truth is identified with the force of argumentation, and the court turns into an object of persuasive influence of the participants of the process. The case of Dmitry Karamazov is given as an example of pragmatics of argumentation on the basis of the concept of formal truth. It is noted that the relativistic practices of dealing with reality and truth are reminiscent of the realities of Orwell's novel "1984", and the question of truth and the assumption of objective reality is connected with human freedom.