The metaphor James uses for pragmatism is a “corridor in a hotel,” with a lot of doors branching off it. Behind one door is a religious man; behind the next is an atheistic woman; then a chemist, a mathematician, an ethicist, and so on—each one offering a possible way to arrive at some kind of fact that we can rely on. The pragmatist can, at any moment, open any of those doors and use what she finds to arrive at truth. It’s the jambalaya of philosophy.
