Style Appropriation, Intimacy, and Expressiveness

Abstract

This paper is about style appropriation: the use by someone of stylistic cultural innovations distinctive of a cultural group that is not her own. While I agree with the key insight of C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl (Philosophical Studies 176 (2019): 981-1002) - namely, that style appropriation is sometimes found objectionable because group intimacy is believed to have been breached - I disagree with their core claim that the settled beliefs of the group cannot be wrong about whether its group intimacy has, in fact, been compromised in this way. I accept that facts about group intimacy can generate normative reasons concerning style appropriation, but develop a distinctive account of how this comes to be so: one which holds that such facts are independently grounded, rather than being decided by group opinion (as Nguyen and Stroll think). This alternative picture of how group intimacy grounds normative reasons does better justice to the intuitive thought that reality, including its normative regions, is belief-independent. The paper ends with some replies to potential objections.