Because of his background in music, Walton expected that he would have an interest in aesthetics and philosophy of art, but was unmoved by his contacts with these fields at Berkeley. After graduating in 1961, he pursued postgraduate studies at Cornell University where he attended a seminar with the British philosopher and aesthetician Frank Sibley that he discovered “how exciting aesthetics can be, how serious, rigorous philosophical thought can connect with real, real-world interests in the arts.”[5] He wrote his dissertation, 'Conceptual Schemes: A Study of Linguistic Relativity and Related Philosophical Problems', with Sydney Shoemaker on philosophy of language, mind and metaphysics, and graduated in 1967 with a Ph.D.