Ludwig, K. (2003). The Mind-Body Problem: An Overview. In S. P. Stich, & T. A. Warfield, (Eds.),The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind (Chapter 1). Wiley, doi:10.1002/9780470998762.ch1
[Citing Place (1956)]
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section 1.6 The Logical Space of Solutions
Subsection 1.6.3 Conceptual reduction
* The psychophysical identity theory (also called “central state materialism”), like functionalism, has antecedents that stretch back to the ancient world. In the twentieth century, it was influentially advocated after the Second World War by Ullin Place (1956), Herbert Feigl (1958), and J. J. C. Smart (1959). Fn 74: The view itself was certainly not undiscussed previously in the twentieth century. Broad discusses and dismisses it (1925: 622–3). C. I. Lewis discussed and criticized a form of the identity theory, which he presents as proposing descriptive definitions of mental terms, in much the same spirit as the theory I have presented (1941: 230–1). Some of Smart’s replies to objections are clearly directed at Broad’s and Lewis’s earlier discussions. Place and Smart held that sensations were to be theoretically identified with brain processes, in the same way that lightning was identified with a certain sort of electrical discharge (this can be generalized straightforwardly to states; see Armstrong 1968). Fn 75: They regarded propositional attitudes as understandable behavioristically, or functionally. However, the position can easily be generalized to propositional attitudes. They
thought of this as a contingent identity, because it was empirically discovered. The position is also sometimes called ‘the topic neutral approach’, because Smart in particular argued that in order that we not have irreducible mental properties, and yet make sense of the possibility of contingent identity, the descriptions by which we pick out mental processes (more generally mental states), which are to be
empirically identified with physical ones, must leave it open whether they are physical or not. This position came into considerable criticism for the claim that identities could be contingent (see Kripke 1980: 98–100, 144–55).