Religious studies

The first entry is l’agnosticisme méthodologique, and the adjective an English reader recognises instantly is the one that has quietly changed underneath them. « Agnostic » still means what it always meant when it stands beside a belief: somebody who holds that the question cannot be settled either way. But over the last thirty years English has given the word a second life in which no god appears at all. A system is « platform-agnostic », a protocol is « vendor-agnostic », a file format is « device-agnostic » — and the sense there is simply indifferent to, works with any. That branch does not exist in French. Agnostique is said of a person and of a position, and it keeps the question of knowledge inside it; an engineer writing French reaches instead for indépendant de la plateforme or compatible avec tous les appareils. Which matters on this page, because l’agnosticisme méthodologique is neither indifference nor a shrug. It is a deliberate suspension: the scholar puts the truth of the claim aside in order to describe how it is held.