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.
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