oh just for the hell of it, i'm going to explain to you where western philosophy went horribly, irremediably wrong. let's place it simplistically at the dawn of modern philosophy: descartes. now descartes' view was that what we directly experience is only our own ideas, essentially conceived of as mental images. that is, we directly experience only our own semiotic entities: symbols for things in the external world. of course, this raises an insoluble scepticism: how do we know our images match up to reality? we can't, since all we have is ideas. the empiricists exacerbated this disease: our experience consists of "impressions" and "ideas": again, mental semiotic phenomena. only through these do we know anything else. kant tried to deal with the myriad problems that arise, and everyone saw immediately that even though kant still had a world outside consciousness (the thing in itself) it wasn't doing any work and that all you needed was consciousness and its semiotic materials.

one problem is that you get absolutely nowhere in explaining perception by mental images: an image requires an eye to be seen no less than does a boulder. start this way and all you get is an infinite procession of humuncular eyes. that's one reason we switch from the image to language starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing through postmodern philosophy, e.g. rorty. all we have access to is language, and we can lose the world etc. this gives you a nice way out in terms of social practices and conventions as well.

but it is more or less the same thing: lock us in a world of symbols, then notice that once you have you ain't got no world.

this is a disastrous, empty dead end. not only is it false, but i think that if descartes or kant or hegel or wittgenstein or rorty had kept faith with their own actual experience for a moment, they'd have realized that they don't believe that we only have truck with symbol systems, which at any rate are roughly as mysterious as worlds. that is, retreating to semiotics doesn't even improve the explanatory situation. the view is arid, and profoundly anti-naturalistic: given a basically darwinian picture of who we are, the idea that we are only acquainted with our own symbols and not with our environment is incompatible with the fact that the human species exists at all, or survived its first crawl into the world.