Analytic Categories and Claims of Special Knowledge

This article examines two categories in which claims of special knowledge are central: Gnosticism and conspiracy theories. In both cases, notions of what counts as ‘religion’ come into play in setting their boundaries, with only certain kinds of religious belief deemed as legitimate. Moreover, the category is privileged over the data. While these cases may be extreme, I contend that they point to a major failure of contemporary social sciences—a commitment to categories about data that leave us upholding the episteme that we should be critiquing.