About me
My name is Billy Dunaway. I work in ethics, metaphysics and the philosophy of language. I am currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Brief descriptions of some of my work are below. Click on 'Papers' for more detailed information about the papers.
I can be contacted at dunaway [at] umich [dot] edu. Comments on anything posted here are very welcome.
Publications
Minimalist Semantics in Meta-ethical Expressivism, Philosophical Studies vol. 151 no. 3, pp. 351-371.
The final version can be found here. (Library subsrciption required)
Modal Quantification without Worlds, conditionally accepted for Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol. 8 (also one of four finalists for the 2011 Younger Scholars Prize for Metaphysics).
Work in Progress
I am writing a dissertation on the relationship between the notion of metaphysical fundamentality (as developed by Kit Fine and others) and realism about the normative. I argue the realism about the normative is best understood as a view concerning how fundamental the normative is (and not, as others would have it, as a thesis about the existence of normative properties, or the “mind–independence” of the normative). This gives rise to a disinctive set of solutions to existinc problems in the meta–ethical literature. In particular, I argue the following are consequences of construing realism in this way:
- realists can address the “Moral Twin Earth problem” from Horgan and Timmons by appeal to the connection between reference magnetism and degrees of fundamentality;
- a solution to the “problem of creeping minimalism” from Jamie Dreier emerges in the form of a difference between “quasi–realist” expressivism and realism over the relative fundamentality of the normative;
- a version of non-naturalistic realism can be explained, on which non-naturalism is the view that normative properties are most fundamental; non-naturalism thus understood is immune to the “supervenience argument” from Frank Jackson, and solves some puzzles surrounding the original argument.
This is a project on experimental philosophy I worked on with Anna Edmonds and David Manley at the University of Michigan. We tested the degree to which the results in experimental philosophy papers are surprising to philosophers by asking philosophers to predict what ordinary folk would say to questions that appear in the experimental philosophy literature. Our hypothesis was that philosophers would be able to reliably predict these things, and this was confirmed to some degree. Go here for a full description of the meta-survey and results.