 The Pragmatic Maxim suggests that pragmatism is a form of empiricism (an idea recently explored further in Wilson 2016). Our ability to think about so-called external things, and steadily improve our understanding of them, rests upon our experience. Yet most pragmatists adopted accounts of experience and perception radically different from the views of modern empiricists from John Locke and David Hume to Rudolf Carnap, as well as the ‘intuition’ posited by Kant. The established view interpreted experience as what is sometimes (following C.I. Lewis and Wilfrid Sellars) called ‘the given’: we are passive recipients of determinate and singular ‘sense-data’. Experience provides raw material for knowledge, but does not itself have content informed by concepts, practical needs, or anything else non-sensory. Our only contact with the external world is through receiving such experiences. So this way of thinking about experience can easily lead to skepticism about the so-called ‘external world’.