Crane, T. (1995). The mental causation debate. Aristotelian Society Supplementary, 69(Supplementary), 211-236.
[Abstract]This paper is about a puzzle which lies at the heart of contemporary physicalist theories of mind. On the one hand, the original motivation for physicalism was the need to explain the place of mental causation in the physical world. On the other hand, physicalists have recently come to see the explanation of mental causation as one of their major problems. But how can this be? How can it be that physicalist theories still have a problem explaining something which their physicalism was intended to explain in the first place? If physicalism is meant to be an explanation of mental causation, then why should it still face the problem of mental causation?
[Citing Place (1956)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section 3. The arguments for physicalism
* Why believe in physicalism? The pioneers of the identity theory, U.T. Place and J.J.C. Smart, were chiefly concerned to show that the theory cannot be ruled out a priori for semantic or conceptual reasons. Fn 4 See Place, ‘Is Consciousness a Brain Process?’ p.42, and Smart, ‘Sensations and Brain Processes’ p. 54 in C.V. Borst (ed.) The Mind-Brain Identity Theory (London: Macmillan 1970). Influential as it was, this argument is negative in character, and gives no positive reason for believing in physicalism. The only explicit positive argument given by Smart was based on Occam’s Razor. But this would not impress Cartesian dualists, many of whom would argue that non-physical mental substances need to be posited in order to explain certain phenomena (e.g. conscious experience). Independent argument is needed.