Armstrong, D. M. (1993). Preface to the paperback edition of A materialist theory of the mind. In D. M. Armstrong, A materialist theory of the mind. Revised edition (pp. xiii-xxiii). Routledge.
[Citing Place (1956)]  [Citing Place (1988a)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
* There have been philosophers who were materialists about the mind almost from the beginning. But in this century, the view that mental states, events and processes are purely physical states, events and processes in the brain did not win much favour among philosophers until the work done by Ullin Place (1956), Herbert Feigl (1958) and Jack Smart (1959). And Feigl, though he did much to help resurrect this view, did not put forward as pure a physicalism as the other two. Place and Smart were working at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, at the time, and the attitude of the great majority of the philosophical world at the time was perhaps summed up by an English philosopher who remarked ‘A touch of the sun, I suppose’. (I have checked the truth of this story with the philosopher in question. He is quite impenitent.)
Place never quite got the credit that he should have had as the pioneer, although Smart always acknowledged his role. A tactical mistake was made. While Smart published his paper in the Philosophical Review, and Feigl had the ear of important American philosophers, including Wilfrid Sellars, Place’s article appeared in the British Journal of Psychology, little read by philosophers.
My book was part of a second wave of contributions to the topic that occurred in the 1960s. Perhaps because of the way that my argument took off from the positions of Place and Smart, positions that were very close to each other, I am usually represented in the literature as holding an Identity theory, which was the name given to the Place/Smart theory. I was never too keen on the phrase and did not use it to describe my view. As I saw it then, and still pretty much see it, my argument had (and has) two steps. First there is proposed a logical or conceptual analysis of the mental concepts. In Chapter 6, §VIII, this is called the Causal analysis. Roughly, the assertion is that mental states are states apt for the production of certain ranges of behaviour and, in some cases, apt for being produced by certain ranges of stimuli. Later on I just called it the Causal theory (see my paper ‘The Causal theory of the mind’, 1977). Nowadays I sometimes speak of it as the Causal version of Functionalism. The second step was to ask what in fact it is that is apt for causing and being caused in this way. The answer to that, I said, is physical states of the brain, thus reaching what I called, following Feigl, Central-State Materialism.
* One clear difference that I did have with the Place/Smart theory is that, unlike them, I applied the theory to all mental states, events and processes instead of just sensations and conscious processes. The Causal theory is not to be found explicitly in Place’s or Smart’s article, although they do work with a notion that is implicitly causal, the notion of a stimulus. The experience of having a certain sort of after-image is described as the sort of experience we have when a green patch of light (Place) or the surface of a ripe orange (Smart) is before our eyes. The experience, it can be said, is defined in terms of what is apt to produce it. No appeal is made to what the mental state is apt for producing. Suppose, though, that we want, as I wanted, to bring such things as purposes and beliefs within the scope of the theory. Almost anything might produce a purpose or a belief, so we must turn to what these things are apt for producing: namely, behaviour. In general the ‘apt for producing’ comes to play a far greater role in the theory than the ‘apt for being produced by’. Behaviourism is false, but one is not far from the truth if one defines the mind as the cause of behaviour.
Smart very quickly accepted this widening, but Place never has.
Citing Place (1988a) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):