An instrumentalist conception of perception itself would imply a significant shift both in how we design animal studies and interpret the resulting behavior and in how we understand our own research activities themselves.
Overly fixating on #pragmatism being an "American" philosophy is, through the lens of #experimentalism, akin to fixating on a particular petri dish in a lab where certain effects were first observed.
What's interesting, what's scientific, is to see what happens when we try to generalize phenomena beyond the singular instance of their first observation, when we try to replicate the fruits of that dish in another.
Ultimately 'USA' is no less parochial a notion than 'petri dish 16B'!