so we've got a little philosophical thing going about realism at minds and brains and plastic bodies and object-oriented philosophy (gary williams, tom sparrow, graham harman) on whether or not there are any anti-realists etc: first let me say that it's a matter of emphasis: you have a real world out there, but does it do any work? or are you stuck in your own little head looking at sense data or words, or jammed in the social with no way out, constructing the world together with the rest of your peeps, e.g. sarah palin? what work do things external to the human do in your philosophy? now really if minds and brains wants one example, i give you richard rorty's essay 'the world well lost.' but just a few highlights: logical positivism builds on british empiricism and says that the only actual access to reality comes via sense data, or images in the head. heidegger identifies the history of being with the history of western philosophy: our world was established when the greeks built a temple. all the contemporary textualists and narrativists have no time for realities out there: "there is nothing outside the text." a couple of passages of textualism (quoted in my end of story):

Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking): "If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference, but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world."

Richard Rorty ("Texts and Lumps"): "all thought is in language, so that thoughts have meaning only by virtue of their relations to other thoughts."

Hans-Georg Gadamer ("The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem"): "Language is the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the-world and the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world."

russell, husserl, mead, carnap, wittgenstein, quine, davidson, derrida, lacan, french feminism, etc etc. deal with it!