Soames Reference and Description

The Case against Two-Dimensionalism
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2645-2
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten, EPUB

In this book, Scott Soames defends the revolution in philosophy led by Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan against attack from those wishing to revive descriptivism in the philosophy of language, internalism in the philosophy of mind, and conceptualism in the foundations of modality. Soames explains how, in the last twenty-five years, this attack on the anti-descriptivist revolution has coalesced around a technical development called two-dimensional modal logic that seeks to reinterpret the Kripkean categories of the necessary aposteriori and the contingent apriori in ways that drain them of their far-reaching philosophical significance.


Arguing against this reinterpretation, Soames shows how the descriptivist revival has been aided by puzzles and problems ushered in by the anti-descriptivist revolution, as well as by certain errors and missteps in the anti-descriptivist classics themselves. Reference and Description sorts through all this, assesses and consolidates the genuine legacy of Kripke and Kaplan, and launches a thorough and devastating critique of the two-dimensionalist revival of descriptivism. Through it all, Soames attempts to provide the outlines of a lasting, nondescriptivist perspective on meaning, and a nonconceptualist understanding of modality.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Soames, Scott

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophie des Geistes, Neurophilosophie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

A Word about Notation ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1

PART ONE: THE REVOLT AGAINST DESCRIPTIVISM 5

CHAPTER 1: The Traditional Descriptivist Picture 7
CHAPTER 2: Attack on the Traditional Picture Proper Names, Non-Descriptionality, and Rigid Designation 14

PART TWO: DESCRIPTIVIST RESISTANCE: THE ORIGINS OF AMBITIOUS TWO-DIMENSIONALISM 33

CHAPTER 3: Reasons for Resistance and the Strategy for Descriptivist Revival 35
CHAPTER 4: Roots of Two-Dimensionalism in Kaplan and Kripke 43
CHAPTER 5: Stalnaker’s Two-Dimensionalist Model of Discourse 84
CHAPTER 6: The Early Two-Dimensionalist Semantics of Davies and Humberstone 106

PART THREE: AMBITIOUS TWO-DIMENSIONALISM 131

CHAPTER 7: Strong and Weak Two-Dimensionalism 133
CHAPTER 8: Jackson’s Strong Two-Dimensionalist Program 149
CHAPTER 9: Chalmers’s Two-Dimensionalist Defense of Zombies 194
CHAPTER 10: Critique of Ambitious Two-Dimensionalism 267

PART FOUR: THE WAY FORWARD 327

CHAPTER 11: Positive Nondescriptivism 329
Index 355

Über Autor(innen)

Scott Soames, formerly Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, is now Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volumes 1 and 2 (Princeton), Beyond Rigidity, and Understanding Truth.