If you are a philosophical realist, you cannot be an empirical realist.
A philosophical realist is an empirical idealist.
A philosophical realist do not interacts but distance his aesthetics [confined to his mind] from reality with a reality-Gap.
An empirical realist embraces, entangles, engages and interacts with reality, i.e.
{subject ↔ reality}.
In this model, reality is interdependent with the subject.
A philosophical realist aka empirical idealist assumes reality is independent of his mind[subject] thus there is always a reality gap between the philosophical realist and reality, i.e.
{subject → reality GAP ← reality}
Example,
‘Subject’ -reality Gap - ‘the real table’
In this case the subject do not embraces, entangles, engages and interacts with the supposedly real table.
The subject only perceived what is supposedly the real table via waves and what is real to the subject are merely sense-data, thoughts [concepts and ideas] and brain activities in his brain.
Even if the subject touched the table there is still a ‘reality Gap’ between the ‘real table’ and the subject.
The question here is, is there a real table out there that is perceived, seen or touched?
Note Bertrand Russell’s dilemma;
Among these surprising possibilities, doubt suggests that perhaps there is no table at all.
Such questions are bewildering, and it is difficult to know that even the strangest hypotheses may not be true. Thus our familiar table, which has roused but the slightest thoughts in us hitherto, has become a problem full of surprising possibilities. The one thing we know about it is that it is not what it seems. Beyond this modest result, so far, we have the most complete liberty of conjecture. Leibniz tells us it is a community of souls: Berkeley tells us it is an idea in the mind of God; sober science, scarcely less wonderful, tells us it is a vast collection of electric charges in violent motion.
-Problem of Philosophy - Appearance versus Reality
That is the dilemma faced by the philosophical-realist’s position which culminated to the doubt, perhaps there is no real table out there at all?