Soames on two-dimensionalism

Scott Soames' book Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism was recently published by Princeton University Press (Amazon has the table of contents).  The book discusses various sorts of two-dimensionalism, but the heart of it is a critique of the sort of "ambitious two-dimensionalism" held by Frank Jackson and by me.  The book has a 70-page chapter arguing against my version of the view, as well as a lot of other relevant material.  There will be a reading group on the book in the coming weeks at the ANU (with Jackson and others involved too), and I'm supposed to be writing a critical notice of the book for Mind.  While working through the book, I'll probably post some reactions to this weblog.

It looks like two chapters of the book are online: Chapter 1 and an old version of Chapter 10.  Those who are interested and haven't seen it already might also look at my piece "Soames on Two-Dimensionalism".  This is a detailed handout from a symposium at Arizona State University last year, where I responded to two talks by Soames, which turn out to correspond fairly closely to Chapters 7 and 10 of his book.  The review article I linked to recently may also give some useful background.

The upshot of my Arizona State piece was that the versions of two-dimensionalism that Soames attacks are versions that no-one accepts (as far as I know), and certainly are quite different from the versions that I favor.  In particular, most of Soames' arguments against two-dimensionalism in those talks were really arguments against certain two-dimensionalist accounts of propositional attitude ascriptions, accounts that I take to be obviously false and that no-one has endorsed in print, to my knowledge.  The good news is that in the book Soames discusses other accounts of attitude ascriptions, in particular giving a number of further arguments against the account that I endorse.  I don't think that two-dimensionalism stands or falls with this (or with any) account of attitude ascriptions, but nevertheless I don't think Soames' arguments against it work.  I'll post something about those arguments in coming weeks, as well as about other more general considerations.