"Empiricism" is generally understood as the position that all knowledge is derived from sense experience.  

"Skepticism" is generally understood as the position that knowledge is unattainable (either with respect to some particular domain, or generally).  

In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume starts out sounding like a pretty straightforward empiricist, at least when it comes to any knowledge that we might come to possess about "matters of fact."  By the end of section 4 of the Enquiry, it seems as if Hume is also a skeptic about "matters of fact."  

Is this connection a necessary one?  If one is committed to "empiricism," is the only rationally consistent option to also be committed to "skepticism?"

@Mickey Brewer:

     Your post is both eloquent and compelling. While I admire your observation "Skeptical arguments generally tend to invoke the improbable or the surreal", I would counter that this isn't always the case- many Republicans/right-thinking people are skeptical of "climate change", and more specifically our influence on it as an industrialized world. There's nothing improbable or surreal about our impact there- one of my favorite scientists, Carl Sagan, was warning us about "global warming" decades ago... Still, your overall assessment is one I agree with. As knowledgeable as the human race is here in modern times, to be skeptical of our present technology is a stance on the fringe of general consensus- yet, we need people voicing, and acting upon, those doubts.

@Harmony Chavis:

     I'm just going to go "gonzo" here and state that skepticism is, at least theoretically, always a good idea. Assuming that our past experience will bear up tomorrow is asking for trouble... and your example of assuming the sun will rise again is perfect. It becomes a question of balance- we have to believe that many things in our life will behave in a predictable way; otherwise we'd go crazy (or at least OCD, checking the door lock dozens of times before we go to bed). Yes, the odds must be billions-to-one for the fact that the sun will rise (actually, that the Earth will keep rotating) from one 24-hour period to the next... yet we cannot be totally empirical in that knowledge.

   In my opinion, David Hume's thesis on this comes near the end of his Section 4, when he first leads with this example:

"When a child has felt pain from touching the flame of a candle, he will be careful not to put his hand near any candle, and will expect a similar effect from any cause that is similar in its appearance...

     He then follows with this:

"It isn’t through reasoning (my emphasis) that we are led to suppose the future to resemble the past and to expect similar effects from apparently similar causes."

     Questioning everything is how the true pioneers of thought have made all their discoveries/inventions throughout history. Albert Einstein had a great admiration for Isaac Newton, as an example- but he was willing to be skeptical of his predecessor's "laws", and to poke some holes in them. Someone may very well prove Einstein wrong too, eventually. (It would be great to find out that we can travel faster than the speed of light, especially if humanity hopes to immigrate into other parts of the galaxy).