 Dewey received and responded to many criticisms of his metaphysical views, from 1905’s “Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” and on. Critics often overlooked that his position was aiming to undercut prevailing metaphysical genres; often, his view was just aligned with one or another existing position. (He was taken, variously, as in league with realism, idealism, relativism, subjectivism, etc. See Hildebrand 2003.) One recurrent criticism was that the view advanced in PIE (that “things are what they are experienced as”) could not possibly yield a metaphysics because it merely bespoke the kind of subjective, immediate experience inimical to a more mediated and objective account. Similar reactions arrived twenty years late to EN from critics attacking the contrast there between “experience” and  “nature”.[19]