Koksvik, O. (2010). Metaphysics of consciousness. In G. Oppy, & N. Trakakis (Eds.), A Companion to Philosophy in Australasia. Monash University Publishing.
[Citing Place (1956)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section The Identity Theory
* The identity theory of the mind was developed at the University of Adelaide by U. T. Place, an English psychologist who was a lecturer there from 1951 to 1954. Place was strongly influenced by discussions with J. J. C. Smart [...] and C. B. Martin. Martin was an emergentist, not a materialist, but despite differences in views, his influence on the philosophers who interacted with him, in Adelaide (1954–66), Sydney (1966–71) and elsewhere, is widely acknowledged.
Place (1956) argues that a reasonable scientific hypothesis is that the ‘intractable residue’ of conscious experience is identical with processes in the brain. While the metaphysical independence of (kinds of) entities can often be inferred from the logical independence of statements about them, this is not always so, and conscious states and brain processes constitute one of the exceptions. [...] In general, commonsense observations and scientific observations should be taken to be observations of the very same phenomenon whenever the latter, together with relevant theory, provide ‘an immediate explanation’ of the former (Place 1956: 48). That is precisely what Place expects to see as our understanding of the brain advances: patterns emerging in the study of brain processes will eventually allow us to explain all our introspective observations.
J. J. C. (‘Jack’) Smart, born in Cambridge and educated at the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford, held a chair at the University of Adelaide from 1950 to 1972. Originally a behaviourist, he was convinced by Place (and also influenced by Feigl 1958) to adopt the identity theory. Smart (1959) argues that we must either understand conscious mental states as ‘nomological danglers’ (the term is due to Feigl) or identify them with brain processes. We have, he says, good reasons to reject nomological danglers but no good reason to reject the identification, so the identification should be accepted.
* Another aspect of Smart’s article is worth noting, because it may partially explain why it became so influential, even though it was largely concerned with defending a claim already made by one of his colleagues. U. T. Place had called the sense of identity he employed ‘the “is” of composition’ and had introduced it by means of analogies with cases such as someone’s table being an old packing case and someone’s hat being a bundle of straw (Place 1956: 45). This seems to leave at least some room for a distinction between the experience and the brain process: if four legs plus a tabletop compose a table, the result is usually taken to be six, and not five, distinct objects in total. In contrast, Smart insists that sensations and brain processes are strictly identical (Smart 1959b: 145).