In the opening pages of his Perspectiva, Roger Bacon (ca. 1219/20–ca. 1292) compares the five senses in order to determine their particular contributions to knowledge, and singles out vision as the one sense that allows us to “experience” received wisdom. I consider Bacon’s arguments for this claim, and work out the exact meaning of experiri in these very dense pages. I ask whether we should read Bacon’s statement as a commitment avant la lettre to experimentalism in the early modern sense, and put forward an alternative reading: I argue that Bacon’s theory must be understood in light of his analysis of the visual process and, more specifically, of his claim that vision is the only sense in which perception takes place “by syllogism.” On these grounds, Bacon argues that vision is the only sense with a science of its own—perspectiva—dedicated to identifying the cases in which our perception can be taken to be true and trustworthy. Indeed, Bacon did not intend to ground science on experiments, but rather to establish and employ the “science of vision” as a way of verifying sense-perception, so as to enable perceivers to “experience” received knowledge and attain new insights into the world.