Styles of Action

ABSTRACT Discussions of style in contemporary analytic philosophy have been confined almost exclusively to aesthetics, yet many bodily actions seem to exhibit styles as well. We can have an aggressive or a placid style of driving; a sloppy or a meticulous style of washing the dishes; an idiomatic or a weird way of playing jazz. We often use the notion of style not just to catalogue different behavioral patterns, but also to explain, predict, and excuse them. In this paper, I develop and defend a novel and substantive account of style, and I argue that all our habitual and skilled bodily actions are styled in this sense. The phenomenon of style turns out to far outstrip artistic performances and to constitute an important dimension of our agency. No theory of human action, then, can be considered comprehensive if it cannot account for action styles.