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How American Is Pragmatism?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Alexander Klein
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Abstract

This essay examines the provenance of a single, curious term that William James often used in connection with his own pragmatism. The term is Denkmittel, an uncommon German contraction of Denk (thought) and Mittel (instrument). James’s Central European sources for this now forgotten bit of philosophical jargon provide a small illustration of a bigger historical point that too often gets obscured. Pragmatism—James’s pragmatism, at least—was both allied with and inspired by a broader sweep of scientific instrumentalism that was already flourishing in fin de siècle European philosophy.

Type
Realism and Epistemic Humility
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 88 , Issue 5 , December 2021 , pp. 849 - 859
Copyright
Copyright 2021 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

†

An early version of this article was given at the European Pragmatism conference at the Vienna Circle Institute. I thank organizers and participants for helpful feedback. For further discussion and feedback I am also indebted to Don Howard, Johannes Steizinger, Clinton Tolley, and especially Trevor Pearce, who first urged me to look into the Lasswitz connection.

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