Savage, C. W. (2006). A New/Old (Pluralist) Resolution of the Mind-Body Problem In S. H. Kellert, H. E. Longino, & C. K. Waters (Eds.), Scientific pluralism (Pp. 132-166). University of Minnesota Press.
[Citing Place (1956)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
* In 1967 the identity theory was at its zenith. Herbert Feigl’s compendious “The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’” (1958) had been required reading for nine years and had just been reissued with a postscript (1967). J. J. C. Smart’s “Sensations and Brain Processes” (1959) was only one year younger and, short and simple as it was, had been read by almost everyone. Note 2. In his first footnote Smart cites U. T. Place’s essay of two years earlier, “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” (1956), as the precursor to his own. He adds that his own essay is “meant also to supplement” Feigl’s (1958).
Section Confirmation of Psychophysical Identities
Subsection Experimental Confirmation
* I can confirm that the greenish gray glob hanging from the limb of a distant tree is a swarm of bees by approaching it until individual bees appear. I can confirm that the white flecks I see on the countertop are particles of sugar by touching them and tasting them. If necessary I can employ a magnifying glass to look more closely at the flecks. I cannot confirm that my pain is neural excitation in my somatosensory cortex or that my visual percept is excitation in my visual cortex by comparable methods. Introspecting my pain or my percept more closely or attentively does not cause either to appear as neural excitation, Note 6 Place makes this point in a memorable passage: “A closer introspective scrutiny will never reveal the passage of nerve impulses over a thousand synapses in the way that a closer scrutiny of a cloud will reveal a mass of tiny particles in suspension. The operations required to verify statements about consciousness and statements about brain processes are fundamentally different” (1956, 47). and there is no method for observing neural excitation that can be correlated with introspection in the way that vision and touch can be correlated, so as to indicate that the two observations have the same object.
Section Logical Objections to Psychophysical Identities
Subsection Objection from Leibniz’s Law
* The objection from this law to mind-body identity maintains that mental processes possess some properties not possessed by neural processes and hence cannot be identified with such processes. For example, although the roundness of your red, round afterimage seen with eyes closed can perhaps be identified with some property of neural excitation, say the roundness of the area of correlated neural excitation, its redness cannot; for no brain process in its normal condition is red. [...]
In the case of the red afterimage, the usual reply is that the sensation, which consists in having a red afterimage, is not itself red but is rather a sensation of red. What object then is red? The intentionalist answer is that it is an “intentional object,” the object of a mental act of the same type as an unfulfilled expectation or a false thought. This answer is objectionable to physicalists because intentional objects, if they exist at all, are surely nonphysical. Most physicalists subscribe to one of the answers suggested by U. T. Place and J. J. C. Smart. According to Place (1956, 49), a sensation is a sensation of red if it has the quality sensations possess when produced by red physical objects such as ripe cherries. This quality is not red: it is the physical object that is red. Thus described “topic neutrally” (to use Smart’s term), a sensation of red can be identified with neural excitation of the type produced by seeing a red physical object: its type defined in terms of intensity, frequency, and/or other properties of neural excitation. The difficulty with this suggestion is our overwhelming impression that something is red when we have a red afterimage or a hallucination of a ripe cherry. It is not a ripe cherry or other red physical object, none being present, and it cannot be a neural process since no such process is red. To what is this phenomenal quality red to be assigned, if not to the cherry and not to the sensation? It is, to use Feigl’s term, “homeless.”
Smart’s suggestion (1959, 148–50) is easily confused with that of Place. Like Place, he maintains that a sensation is a sensation of red if it has the neural quality sensations possess when produced by physical objects such as ripe cherries. But he does not say “when produced by red physical objects.” According to him, colors are “powers to evoke certain sorts of discriminatory responses” (149) in perceivers, such as the response of discriminating ripe cherries from lettuce leaves. He admits that colors are powers that produce sensations, but “sensations ... identifiable with brain processes” (ibid.), which are in a sense colorless. “Sensations are colorless for the same reason that something is colorless” (150), for example, the “something” referred to in my statement that there is something going on in me like what is going on when I see a ripe cherry. Apparently Smart must be interpreted as an extreme eliminative materialist, eliminating what we commonsensically regard as color not only from the sensation but also from the external world, and taking color terms to refer either to unknown properties of neural excitation or to the microphysical properties of objects that produce such excitation. On this view, phenomenal properties such as color are not simply homeless; they are fictitious.
Physicalists who subscribe to Leibniz’s law tend to categorize pain as the perception of bodily injury and then apply a Place or Smart analysis of perception to yield the following result. Strictly speaking, it is bodily injury and not the sensation it produces that is painful; and the quality the subject feels — the so-called phenomenal quality — is the neural quality bodily sensations have when produced by painful bodily injury, whether the sensation is actually produced by such injury or, as in cases of phantom pain, is not. On this analysis the phenomenal qualities of pain become, like the color of an afterimage, homeless or fictitious.