Critical Notice of Scott Soames's Case against Two-Dimensionalism

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This rich and stimulating book1 gives both a clear and cogent big picture of what is at stake in an important current philosophical debate, and some spirited and incisive arguments about the details. It is a defense of what its author regards as a major shift in our thinking about the sources of the intentionality of our speech and thought, and an attack on what he regards as a counterrevolution that is attempting to resurrect the view that was dominant prior to the shift in a new and more sophisticated form. The shift was “the Kripkean revolution,” led by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity, assisted by David Kaplan, Hilary Putnam, and Keith Donnellan. The counterrevolution exploits a piece of technical apparatus, two-dimensional modal semantics, which has its original application in the work of the revolutionaries themselves. The “ambitious two-dimensionalists,” who are the primary target of Soames’s critique, generalized the kind of two-dimensional semantics for indexical and demonstrative expressions developed by David Kaplan and used it to try “to reinstate descriptivism in the philosophy of language, internalism in the philosophy of mind, and some version of conceptualism in our understanding of modality in the face of the challenges that rocked these positions more than thirty years ago” (329). But, Soames argues, this attempt avoids “the deepest and most important philosophical consequences” (54) of Kripke’s work.