>that doesn't mean reality exists outside of my own experience.

I am aware of phenomenology and I've read some Merleau-Ponty. To my taste, however, the situation where an objective/"objective" scientific truth makes consistent predictions about my sensory experiences that suggest a physical outside world and another where that truth makes consistent predictions about the outside world itself, which in turn causes the sensory experiences, don't seem different in a meaningful way. Why make that distinction?