s11098-011-9746-x) Soames’s Argument 1 Against Strong Two-Dimensionalism

This paper criticizes Soames’s main argument against a vari-ant of two-dimensionalism that he calls strong two-dimensionalism. The idea of Soames’s argument is to show that the strong two-dimensionalist’s semantics for belief ascriptions delivers wrong se-mantic verdicts about certain complex modal sentences that contain both such ascriptions and claims about the truth of the ascribed beliefs. A closer look at the formal semantics underlying strong two-dimensionalism reveals that there are two feasible ways of spec-ifying the truth conditions for claims of the latter sort. Only one of the two yields the problematic semantic verdicts, so strong two-dimensionalists can avoid Soames’s argument by settling for th