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  1. Better Understanding Through Falsehood.Benjamin T. Rancourt - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (3):382-405.
    Can understanding be based on false beliefs? I argue that it can. I first argue that the best way to understand the question is that it is whether one can increase one's degree of understanding by adopting an overall less accurate body of beliefs. I identify three sufficient conditions for one body of beliefs to be more accurate than another. Next, I appeal to two widely used methods of comparing degrees of understanding. With these methods, I show that understanding can (...)
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    The virtue of ignorance: How epistemic agency needs cognitive limitations.Benjamin T. Rancourt - 2024 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 62.
    The thesis defended in this article is that epistemology should treat some of our cognitive limitations not as unfortunate defects or external perturbations to be idealized away in theories of epistemic agency, but as necessary underpinnings of good reasoning. We begin with a problem regarding deliberation that calls epistemic agency into question: our reasons in support of belief are never conclusive and never rule out all doubt. Yet we must rule out all doubt to close deliberation; we must close deliberation (...)
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  3. Egoism or the problem of evil: a dilemma for sceptical theism.Benjamin T. Rancourt - 2013 - Religious Studies 49:313-325.
    Sceptical theists undermine the argument from evil by claiming that our ability to distinguish between justified and unjustified evil is weak enough that we must take seriously the possibility that all evil is justified. However, I argue that this claim leads to a dilemma: either our judgements regarding unjustified evil are reliable enough that the problem of evil remains a problem, or our judgements regarding unjustified evil are so unreliable that it would be misguided to use them in our decision-making. (...)
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  4. The More Evidence Heuristic.Benjamin T. Rancourt - 2016 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 5 (6):27-41.
    If A confirms H and B confirms H, it seems reasonable to infer that A&B confirms H. However, this inference is not valid; it is only a heuristic. I show that the level of confirmation A and B each give to H by itself implies nothing about the level of confirmation that A&B gives to H. Any combination of values is possible for P(H), P(H|A), P(H|B) and P(H|AB) is possible. Still, I show the heuristic leads from true premises to true (...)
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  5. Epistemic relativism and semantic blindness.Benjamin T. Rancourt - 2015 - Synthese 192 (3):859-876.
    Semantic blindness is the inability to recognize semantic features of terms one can competently use. A theory that implies semantic blindness incurs a burden to explain how one can competently use a term without realizing how the term works. An argument advanced in favor of epistemic relativism is that its main competitors, contextualism and subject-sensitive invariantism, imply that speakers suffer from semantic blindness regarding ‘knows’ while relativism has no such implication. However, there is evidence that relativism also implies semantic blindness (...)
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