Place, U. T. (1974-03-27). Lecture 21: The Mind-Brain Identity Theory (27/3/1974). Section 6
[Abstract]The mind-body problem and its history. The Mind-Brain Identity Theory.
[References]  
Download: Amsterdam Lecture 21.pdf

Place, U. T. (1984c). On the relation between intenTional-with-a-t and mental phenomena and intenSional-with-an-s, mentalistic and Oratio Obliqua locutions [Unpublished paper presented to the Senior Seminar, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds, on Tuesday March 20th 1984; revised in 1987 or 1988].
[References]  [2 citing publications]  
Download: 1984c 1987 On the Relation between Intentional-with-a-T and Mental Phenomena and Intensional-with-an-S, Mentalistic and Oratio Obliqua Locutions.pdf

Place, U. T. (1987c). Causal laws, dispositional properties and causal explanations. Synthesis Philosophica, 2(3), 149-160.
[Abstract]The role in causal explanation of sentences ascribing dispositional properties to the entities involved is discussed in the light of (a) the counterfactual theory of causal necessity originally proposed by Hume (1777) and more recently by Mackie (1962; 1974), (b) Ryle's (1949) hypothetical analysis of dispositional statements. and (c) Goodman's (1965) observation that counterfactuals are "sustained", not only by causal law statements universally quantified over entities of a given kind, but by dispositional statements which are restricted in their scope to a single individual. It is argued that what is required in order to support a causal counterfactual is universal quantification over a period of time which may be as short as you like, provided (a) that it covers the moment when the event hypothesised in the counterfactual is assumed to have occurred and (b) that its restriction to that period can be rationally justified.
[References]  [11 referring publications by Place]  
Download: 1987c Causal Laws, Dispositional Properties and Causal Explanations.pdf with corrections added after publication

Place, U. T. (1988h). Pre-linguistic and post-linguistic concepts. [Presentation to the Generalisation Group, Department of Psychology, University College of North Wales, Bangor at 10 March 1988 and to the Department of Psychology, Trinity College, Dublin at 11 March 1988.]
Note:
After the presentation revised by the author. The last revision is from 24^th March 1999. The central argument of the paper has not been revised.
[References]  [Talks]  
Download: 1988h Pre-Linguistic and Post-Linguistic Concepts.pdf

Place, U. T. (1990e). Critical Notice [Unpublished book review of Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind Brain by Patricia Smith Churchland. MIT Press, l986].
Keywords: conceptual analysis, eliminative materialism, mind-brain identity theory, neurophilosophy
Note:
This critical notice was commissioned by the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Philosophy in 1986 when the book first appeared; but since it was not completed until four years later in 1990, it was never submitted. It was revised in 1999 in anticipation of a meeting with Pat Churchland in Siena, Italy, in October of that year - a meeting that because of the illness of Place never took place.
[References]  [Reviewed publication(s)]  
Download: 1990e Critical Notice.pdf

Place, U. T. (1992d). The role of the ethnomethodological experiment in the empirical investigation of social norms, and its application to conceptual analysis. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 22, 461-474. doi:10.1177/004839319202200403
[Abstract]It is argued that conceptual analysis as practiced by the philosophers of ordinary language, is an empirical procedure that relies on a version of Garfinkel's ethnomethodological experiment. The ethnomethodological experiment is presented as a procedure in which the existence and nature of a social norm is demonstrated by flouting the putative convention and observing what reaction that produces in the social group within which the convention is assumed to operate. Examples are given of the use of ethnomethodological experiments, both in vivo and as a thought experiment, in order to demonstrate the existence of otherwise invisible conventions governing human social behavior. Comparable examples are cited from the writings of ordinary language philosophers of ethnomethodological thought experiments designed to demonstrate the existence of linguistic conventions.
[References]  [Talks]  [1 citing publications]  [12 referring publications by Place]  [1 reprinting collections]  
Download: 1992d The Role of the Ethnomethodological Experiment in the Empirical Investigation of Social Norms, and its Application to Conceptual Analysis.pdf

Place, U. T. (1992e). Behaviorism and behavior analysis in Britain - An historical overview. The ABA Newsletter, 15(4), 5-7.
[References]  
Download: 1992e Behaviorism and Behavior Analysis in Britain.pdf

Place, U. T. (1992j). Towards a reconciliation between the associationist and radical behaviorist traditions in the experimental analysis of behavior. [Unpublished paper. Presented under the title 'The three term contingency as a link between the associationist and radical behaviorist traditions in the experimental analysis of behavior' as Invited Address to the First International Congress on Behaviorism and the Sciences of Behavior, Guadalajara, Mexico, 6th October 1992].
[Abstract]It is an implication of the Law of Non-Contradiction that two incompatible descriptions of the same class of phenomena cannot both be true. This suggests that the future for radical behaviorism must lie in achieving a reconciliation with other disciplines and approaches studying the same or closely related phenomena. The approach known as "associative learning theory" shares a common data basis with radical behaviorism in the area of the experimental analysis of animal behavior. It is separated from radical behaviorism by a different view of the nature of what is learned. According to the radical behaviorist, under certain antecedent conditions (discriminative stimulus + establishing condition) an organism learns to emit a response. According to associative learning theory what is learned is an association between a pair of consecutive stimulus events. When presented with the first member of the pair, the organism learns to "predict" or "expect" the second member of the pair. Until recently, the principal application of this principle was Rescorla and Wagner's (1972) analysis of  Pavlovian (respondent) conditioning. More recently, Adams and Dickinson's (1981) reinforcer-devaluation experiment has led associationists to pay more attention to instrumental (operant) learning. It has also opened up an interesting divergence of views between Dickinson (1988; Heyes and Dickinson, 1991; Dickinson & Balleine, forthcoming) who takes it as evidence of a discontinuity between respondent conditioning, which he interprets in terms of the establishment of mechanical associations, and operant learning which he interprets in terms of the ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires’ of philosophical action theory, and Rescorla (1991) who uses it as evidence for an interpretation of operant learning based on the same principles of stimulus-stimulus association invoked by Rescorla and Wagner to account for respondent conditioning. Standing in the way of a reconciliation between radical behaviorism and associative learning theory are the misgivings of the former about the use made by the latter of ‘mentalistic’ concepts, such as ‘expect,’ ‘anticipate,’ and ‘predict.’ These misgivings may be allayed if attention is paid to the results of applying to such concepts the technique, known as ‘conceptual analysis,’ developed by Wittgenstein (1953; 1958) and the philosophers of the Oxford ‘ordinary language’ school. A recent application of this technique to the linguistic phenomenon known variously as ‘intentionality’ or ‘intensionality’ shows that it consists of two distinct varieties of ‘referential anomaly’ which ‘infect’ the grammatical objects of certain verbs. In one case, the grammatical object is used to indicate a range of possible events any one of which, if it were to occur, would constitute a manifestation or satisfaction of a disposition. In the other case, the grammatical object functions as a quotation of what the agent either has said or might be expected to say or have said. Referential anomaly of the dispositional kind is both unavoidable and benign, but the use of quotations to characterize behavioral dispositions is acceptable for scientific purposes only in those cases where the behavior in question is in fact subject to linguistic control. Since the grammatical object of the verbs ‘know,’ ‘believe’ and ‘think,’ as they occur in belief/desire explanations, takes the form of an embedded indicative sentence in oratio obliqua or indirect reported speech, Dickinson's explanation of instrumental/operant learning in animals involves the scientifically unacceptable metaphor of linguistic initiation and control. Rescorla's theory, on the other hand, requires nothing more than that the organism learn to ‘expect’ or ‘anticipate’ an event (the outcome), given the combination of an antecedent discriminative stimulus and the stimulus constituted by the incipient emission of the response which it evokes. In this case the anomaly of reference in the noun phrase which occurs as the grammatical object of the verb reflects its use as a device for indicating a range of possible outcomes any one of which, if it occurred, would fulfill and confirm the expectation which it specifies.
Note:
UTP made changes to the text of the presentation in 1995 and in 1999.
[References]  [Talks]  
Download: 1992j 1999 Towards a Reconciliation between the Ascociationist and Redical Behaviorist Traditions in the Experimental Analysis of Behavior.pdf

Place, U. T. (1993h). Psychologism and anti-psychologism: An historical overview [Conference presentation]. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society 1993, 37.
[Abstract]Psychologism is the (mistaken) belief that logic is a descriptive science, that the laws of logic describe how people think in the way that the laws of motion describe how things move. Anti-psychologism repudiates psychologism, holding that logic is a normative or prescriptive science like ethics. Its laws tell us how people ought to think, not how they actually think in practice. Psychologism has always had a strong following within psychology, even though the difficulty most human subjects encounter in making correct logical inferences is not easily reconciled with it. But in philosophy the influence of Frege (1894) on Russell and Wittgenstein on the one hand and Husserl on the other has ensured that anti-psychologism has been the dominant orthodoxy both in Austro-Anglo-Saxon Analytic Philosophy and in Continental (German-French) Phenomenology. More recently, Fodor (1975) has pointed out that the causal role played by formally stated logical rules in the basic software of the serial-digital computer shows (a) that psychologism cannot be dismissed, as it has been in the past, on the grounds that logical principles are not the kind of thing that can enter into a causal relation, and (b) that if, as Fodor himself thinks, the serial-digital computer is the right model for the functioning of the brain, psychologism must actually be true. With the replacement of the serial-digital computer by the connectionist network as the preferred model for the way the brain functions, anti-psychologism looks set to become the dominant orthodoxy once again. But this time the case will be argued, not on a priori grounds, but on the the empirical evidence which renders psychologism a massively implausible account of how thought is actually generated.
[References]  [Talks]  
Download: 1993h Psychologism and Anti-Psychologism - A Historical Overview.pdf

Place, U. T. (1996l). Folk psychology from the standpoint of conceptual analysis. In W. O'Donohue, & R. Kitchener (Eds.) The Philosophy of Psychology (Chapter 17, pp. 264-270). Sage. doi:10.4135/9781446279168.n17
[Abstract]Before deciding what status should be given to folk psychology within scientific psychology, we must understand its linguistic peculiarities. To do that, we need to attend to research on the topic within the philosophical tradition known as "conceptual analysis." This research enables us to identify six respects in which folk psychological language can lead us astray, when used in a scientific context: (1) the creation of bogus abstract entities by the process of "nominalizing" predicates and other non-substantival parts of speech, (2) the persistent use of adjectives with evaluative (good/bad) connotations, (3) the systematic evaluation of the content of other people's cognitive attitudes and judgments from the standpoint of the speaker, (4) the distortion of causal accounts of human action by the demand for a single scapegoat on whom to pin the blame when things go wrong, (5) the use of the metaphor of linguistic control when explaining behavior that is not subject to that type of control, (6) the unavoidable use of simile when describing private experience.
[References]  [Talks]  [2 citing publications]  [2 referring publications by Place]  
Download: 1996l Folk Psychology from the Standpoint of Conceptual Analysis.pdf

Place, U. T. (1997h). Wundt's theory of imageless thought as a possible key to the role of slow-wave sleep in depressive ruminations [Conference presentation, presented at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP), Padova, 28th August 1997]. European Society for Philosophy and Psychology
[Abstract]Sleep contributes in two ways to the aetiology of clinical depression. The dream imagery of REM sleep stamps in associations between current environmental events and other emotionally charged incidents in the past, only some of which are depressive in nature. The imageless ruminations of slow-wave sleep have a more specific depressive effect in that they keep alive, often indefinitely, problems for which no solution is to be found.
[References]  [Talks]  
Download: 1997h Wundt's Theory of Imageless Thought as Possible Key to the Role of Slow-Wave Sleep in Depressive Ruminations.pdf

Place, U. T. (1997k). Two theories of meaning: The two-factor dispositional/relational and the single factor relational [Presented at the Twenty Third Philosophy of Science Course, Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, 8th April 1997].
[Abstract]Theories of meaning are of two kinds, two-factor dispositional/relational theories and single factor relational theories. A two-factor dispositional/relational theory of meaning holds that the word 'meaning' has two senses: a primary and fundamental sense in which meaning is a disposition and a secondary and derivative sense in which meaning is a relation. (a) In the primary or dispositional sense, the meaning of a linguistic expression, such as a phrase or sentence, is a disposition, shared by relevantly competent speakers and interpreters of a particular natural language or technical code, to apply certain criteria (which they need not be able to state) in deciding whether or not a particular they encounter is either an instance to which, in the case of a general term or universally quantified sentence, the expression applies or, in the case of a singular term or singularly quantified sentence, the individual to which it refers. (b) In the secondary or relational sense, the meaning of a linguistic expression is the actual individuals assigned, by the application of those criteria, to the extension of a general term or universally quantified sentence or the actual individual referred to by a singular term or singularly quantified sentence when uttered on a particular occasion, as determined by the criteria. Taking their cue from Quine's (1951/1980) repudiation of the analytic/synthetic distinction, many philosophers have defended a purely relational/extensional theory of meaning in which dispositional notions such as 'intension', 'Sinn' ('sense'), 'analytic' and 'necessary' (defined in terms of what it is self-contradictory to deny) play no part. Motivation for the single-factor relational theory comes from logic. That for the two-factor dispositional relational theory defended here comes from psychology. The application of the two-factor theory to scientific principles such as 'Water is H₂O' and Ohm's Law is described.
[References]  [Talks]  
Download: 1997k Two Theories of Meaning - The Two-Factor Dispositional Relational and the Single Factor Relational.pdf

Place, U. T. (1998f). Disposizione ('Dispositions' translated into Italian by Giacomo Gava). In G. Gava, Lessico Epistemologico (Epistemological Lexicon, 2nd edition, pp. 44-51). CLEUP (Cooperativa Libraria Editrice Università di Padova).
[References]  
Download: 1998f Dispositions.pdf the English original that is translated into Italian

Place, U. T. (1999a). Ryle's behaviorism. In W. O'Donohue, & R. Kitchener (Eds.), Handbook of Behaviorism (Chapter 13, pp. 361-398). Academic Press. doi:10.1016/B978-012524190-8/50014-0
[Abstract]A distinction is drawn between the OR-behaviorism of the Americans which wants to make psychology more scientific and the OUR-behaviourism of Wittgenstein and Ryle which comes from the philosophy of language. Ryle's doctrines are classified into those that derive from Wittgenstein and those that are peculiar to Ryle. The latter are sub-classified into failures and successes. Criticisms of Ryle's position by Place, Geach, Medlin, Armstrong and Martin are examined and, where possible, rebutted. I conclude that, with some important exceptions, the dispositional analysis of mental concepts survives, as does, more controversially, the hypothetical analysis of dispositional statements.
Note:
'Brian Medlin challenges Ullin Place on the question of probity in Place's paper "Ryle's Behaviorism" and holds him accountable for defaming him. Medlin wants this rectified. In further correspondence Medlin wants the passage withdrawn from the paper. As the book had already been published, Ullin requested from the publisher that a corrigendum slip be printed and inserted into unsold copies of the book, and sewn in if any further copies of the book were printed.' Note on Box 1, Folder 025 (letters exchanged between Jack Smart, Ullin T. Place, Brian Medlin, Jim Franklin, David Armstrong) held in the Brian Medlin Collection at the Library of Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia.
[References]  [11 citing publications]  [4 referring publications by Place]  
Download: 1999a Ryle's Behaviorism.pdf

Place, U. T. (1999k). Introduction to Essays in Radical Empiricism [Unpublished; edited by T. W. Place]
[Abstract]This is a compilation of introductions that U. T. Place wrote in 1999 to books intended to form a book series under the title “Essays in Radical Empiricism”. Place couldn’t finish this project because of his death on 2 January 2000. The idea was that the books would consist of his published and unpublished papers. Each book would start with an introductory chapter, with the first three sections being the same for all books. These sections were called “Radical Empiricism”, “Metaphilosophy”, and “Conceptual Analysis” and are reproduced in this document as the first three sections. In each book, these sections were to be followed by a section that introduced the theme of the book in question. All the finished sections that introduce a theme are included here. Because not all themes are covered this way, I added sections from a letter in which Place discussed his “Nachlaß” in October 1999. The themes on which Place published and that are missing in this overview are, amongst others, language learning, the evolution of language, and emotion and mood.
[References]  
Download: 1999k Introduction to Essays in Radical Empiricism.pdf

Place, U. T. (2000a). Consciousness and the zombie-within: a functional analysis of the blindsight evidence. In Y. Rossetti, & A. Revonsuo (Eds.), Beyond dissociations: Interaction between dissociated implicit and explicit processing (pp. 295-329). John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/aicr.22.15pla
[Abstract]Cowey & Stoerig's (1995) demonstration that the phenomenon of blindsight applies to monkeys with striate cortical lesions in the same way as it does to humans with similar lesions makes it plausible to argue that the behaviour of mammals and probably that of other vertebrates is controlled by two distinct but closely interdependent and interacting systems in the brain which I shall refer to respectively as 'consciousness' and the 'sub-conscious automatic pilot or "zombie" within'. On this hypothesis, consciousness has three functions, (a) that of categorizing any input that is problematic in that it is either unexpected or significant relative to the individual's current or perennial motivational concerns, (b) that of selecting a response appropriate both to the presence of a thing of that kind and to the individual's motivational concerns with respect to it, and (c) that of monitoring the execution of that response. Conscious/phenomenal experience, on this view, is the first stage in the process whereby problematic inputs are processed by consciousness. Its function is to modify the figure-ground relations within the central representation of a problematic input until an adequate categorization is selected. The sub-conscious automatic pilot or “zombie-within” has two functions (a) that of continuously scanning the total current input and alerting consciousness to any input it identifies as problematic, (b) that of protecting consciousness from overload either by ignoring those non-problematic inputs which require no response or by responding appropriately but automatically to those for which there already exists a well practised skill or other “instinctive” response pattern.
Keywords: consciousness
[References]  [Talks]  [5 citing publications]  [5 referring publications by Place]  [1 reprinting collections]  
Download: 2000a Consciousness and the Zombie-within a Functional Analysis of the Blindsight Evidence.pdf