Ideas are not knowledge until they are tested or experienced

A lot of my notes so far fall into cultural/psychological belief territory. They are certainly subject to confirmation bias as Confirmation bias is the one to watch for. How do I apply the scientific method and Ways to counteract confirmation bias in these instances?

I want it to be the case that if I say or write something, I have tested it in some way. I don’t necessarily have to experience it myself to test it, it’s more about gathering data points from reality.

Ways to do this:

• Read biographies to see if they match what you’re saying
• Ask yourself to provide examples for what you’re saying
• Ask yourself what exactly you mean in detail
• Think about concrete messy examples from your life or friends’ lives
• Talk through it with a critical minded friend

Quotes from Democracy and Education which express the same idea

Words, the counters for ideals, are, however, easily taken for ideas. And in just the degree in which mental activity is separated from active concern with the world, from doing something and connecting the doing with what is undergone, words, symbols, come to take the place of ideas. The substitution is the more subtle because some meaning is recognized. But we are very easily trained to be content with a minimum of meaning, and to fail to note how restricted is our perception of the relations which confer significance. We get so thoroughly used to a kind of pseudo-idea, a half perception, that we are not aware how half-dead our mental action is, and how much keener and more extensive our observations and ideas would be if we formed them under conditions of a vital experience which required us to use judgment: to hunt for the connections of the thing dealt with.

The imposing stupendous bulk of this material has unconsciously influenced men’s notions of the nature of knowledge itself. The statements, the propositions, in which knowledge, the issue of active concern with problems, is deposited, are taken to be themselves knowledge. The record of knowledge, independent of its place as an outcome of inquiry and a resource in further inquiry, is taken to be knowledge. The mind of man is taken captive by the spoils of its prior victories; the spoils, not the weapons and the acts of waging the battle against the unknown, are used to fix the meaning of knowledge, of fact, and truth.

…it means that we have no right to call anything knowledge except where our activity has actually produced certain physical changes in things, which agree with and confirm the conception entertained. Short of such specific changes, our beliefs are only hypotheses, theories, suggestions, guesses, and are to be entertained tentatively and to be utilized as indications of experiments to be tried.

If the living, experiencing being is an intimate participant in the activities of the world to which it belongs, then knowledge is a mode of participation, valuable in the degree in which it is effective. It cannot be the idle view of an unconcerned spectator.