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The insider-outsider distinction is obvious and useful: it is undeniable that members of certain groups or strata have privileged access to knowledge, resources and authority. Some argue that this distinction raises fundamental problems for the scholar of religion. This article distinguishes two 'insiderisms': the weak version holds that certain groups have privileged access to knowledge; the strong version holds that certain groups have monopolistic access. We argue that there is a specifically religious form of the latter, based on the supposedly sui generis nature of religious knowledge, and we offer a semantic critique of this view. Based on semantic holism-an important philosophical theory of meaning-this critique holds that all evidence for mental states is overt, public, and observable and, hence, that there can be no significant difference in the access to knowledge of insiders and outsiders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]