The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought · John Dewey
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE[7]
It should be possible to discern and describe a knowing as one identifies any object, concern, or event. It must have its own marks; it must offer characteristic features--as much so as a thunder-storm, the constitution of a State, or a leopard. In the search for this affair, we are first of all desirous for something which is for itself, contemporaneously with its occurrence, a cognition, not something called knowledge by another and from without--whether this other be logician, psychologist, or epistemologist. The “knowledge” may turn out false, and hence no knowledge; but this is an after-affair; it may prove to be rich in fruitage of wisdom, but if this outcome be only wisdom after the event, it does not concern us. What we want is just something which takes itself as knowledge, rightly or wrongly.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.