This paper criticizes Soames’s main argument against a variant 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
semantic 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 specifying 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 the other way.
Keywords Belief ascriptions – Propositional attitude ascriptions – Soames – Two-dimensionalism – Two-dimensional semantics