Research
My research centres on various topics within social philosophy, modal epistemology, metaphysics, and practical rationality. Currently, I focus on three interrelated projects. First, I investigate how an agent’s social context may hinder their epistemic access to their own abilities. Second, I examine which options someone rationally ought to represent, given their beliefs about their abilities. And third, I am developing a new theory of disability with a special focus on enculturation and the normativity of ability.
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Journal Articles
Kikkert, S. (2022). 'Ability's Two Dimensions of Robustness'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoac002
I individuate two dimensions along which abilities can be robust. Dimension I distinguishes the successful exercise of abilities, which requires local control, from cases of lucky success. Dimension II concerns the global availability of relevant acts, which ensures that an agent has the option to perform some act across a variety of scenarios. I show how this framework resolves a point of tension in the literature regarding the strength of the robustness required for ability and explain how it provides insight in the relation between ability possession and exercise.
Kikkert, S. and Segundo-Ortin, M. (forthcoming). 'Disability, Affordances, and the Dogma of Harmony: Socializing the EE-model of Disability', Topoi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-024-10120-0
Recent years have seen increased interest among 4E cognition scholars in physical disability, leading to the development of the EE-model of disability. This paper contributes to the literature on disability and 4E cognition in three key ways. First, it examines the relationship between the EE-model and social constructivist views that address the bodily reality of disablement, highlighting commonalities and distinctions. Second, it critiques the EE-model’s focus on individual strategies for expanding disabled persons’ affordance landscapes, arguing that disability policy should integrate insights from both the EE-model and social constructivist approaches. Finally, it assesses the EE-model against the “dogma of harmony.” We argue that while the EE-model’s focus on active human-environment collaboration is valuable, it can inadvertently perpetuate this dogma. We contend that integrating certain social constructivist insights can help the EE-model avoid the dogma of harmony.
Book Chapters
Ability Knowledge and Epistemic Disadvantage (Commissioned)
We learn about our own abilities from various sources. I argue that an agent's social identity may interact with the reliability of some of these sources. In effect, some agents are in a worse position than others to learn about their own abilities in certain domains. I discuss three ways in which an agent's social background may affect their available evidence - i.e., it may influence (i) feedback from others; (ii) their affordance landscape; and (iii) the availability of representative attempts by agents who are similar to them -, and argue that this can lead even epistemically rational agents to foster inaccurate beliefs about their own abilities. I further assess several ways to remedy the fact that some (often already socially disadvantaged) agents are at an (additional) disadvantage when it comes to acquiring knowledge of their own abilities and propose that `playful' environments that create space for low-stakes trial-and-error can facilitate the development of more accurate self-assessments.
Mental Disorder and the Normativity of Ability: Why Means Matter (Commissioned)
The recent literature on mental disorder has increasingly turned to ability-based approaches, which characterise mental disorder in terms of the absence or breakdown of certain abilities. This chapter examines the broad structure such views must have to be extensionally adequate. I argue that ability attributions are inherently normative along three dimensions: qualitative; quantitative; and morphological. Ability's evaluability along the morphological dimension suggests that proponents of ability-based views must engage with the ‘shape’ of abilities -- that is, the means by which they can reliably be exercised -- to avoid misclassifying individuals who rely on problematic coping strategies as mentally healthy. These observations are in tension with some of the aims and motivations for recent ability-based views, notably the Skill View's aim to provide a value-neutral definition of mental disorder (Leder and Zawidzki, 2023) and the Rehability View's suggestion that such views can be entirely non-committal about the causes of mental health and disorder (Dembić, 2024). While ability-based views remain promising, they must be refined to accommodate these insights concerning the normativity of ability.
Book Reviews
Kikkert, S. and Vetter, B. (2024). 'Options and Agency', Australasian Journal of Philosophy,
Work in Progress
If you'd like to read one of my draft papers, feel free to email me at s.kikkert@lmu.de