 Dewey’s suggestion of “experience as method” method, then, is both a warning and a positive recommendation. It warns philosophers to recognize that while intellectual terms may seem “original, primitive and simple” they should be understood as the historically and normatively situated “products of discrimination and classification” (EN, LW1: 386; see also 371–372, 375). “Knowing” is not an activity standing somehow beyond experience or nature; it is an activity with its own standpoint and qualitative character. Intellectual products come, then, from earlier inquiries, which possessed their own parameters and purposes. Whatever theory is eventually devised for a new situation—and Dewey is not against theory, to be very clear—it must be checked against ordinary experience (EN, LW1: 26).