Livingston, P. (2002). Experience and structure: Philosophical history and the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9(3), 15-33.
[Abstract]Investigation and analysis of the history of the concepts employed in contemporary philosophy of mind could significantly change the contemporary debate about the explainability of consciousness. Philosophical investigation of the history of the concept of qualia and the concept of scientific explanation most often presupposed in contemporary discussions of consciousness reveals  the origin of both concepts in some of the most interesting philosophical  debates of the twentieth century. In particular, a historical investigation of the inheritance of concepts of the elements of experience and the nature of scientific explanation from C. I. Lewis and Rudolf Carnap to contemporary theorists like David Chalmers shows the profound continuity of these concepts throughout the analytic tradition, despite important changes in the dimensions of philosophical relevance and significance that have characterized the emerging debate. I argue that, despite the significant methodological shift from the  foundationalist epistemology of the 1920s to today’s functionalist explanations of the mind, the problem of explaining consciousness has remained the problem of analysing or describing the logical and relational structure of immediate, given experience. Appreciation of this historical continuity of form recommends a more explicit discussion of the philosophical reasons for the underlying distinction between structure and content, reasons that trace to Lewis and Carnap’s influential but seldom-discussed understanding of the relationship between subjectivity, conceived as the realm of private, ineffable contents, and objectivity, understood as public, linguistic expressibility. With this historical background in mind, the contemporary debate about the explanation of consciousness can be reinterpreted as a debate about the relationship between ineffable experience and structurally conceived meaning.
[Citing Place (1956)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section III
* A turning point in the development of physicalism away from Carnap’s semantic doctrine and towards the ontological view of Kim’s ‘layered picture’ of reality was the development in the 1950s of the Identity Theory of mind, according to which qualitative states of experience are simply neurological states of the brain. Though the theory would soon be criticized for its inability to account for conscious experience, its original motivation was, ironically, an attempt to replace an earlier physicalist theory’s inadequate account of experience. For when J.J.C. Smart and U.T. Place first formulated the Identity Theory, they framed their suggestion as a reaction to Ryle’s ‘logical behaviourist’ explanations of mental concepts (Place, 1956; Smart, 1959; for the background, see Ryle, 1949). Smart and Place found it implausible that sensations could be behavioural dispositions because they thought it evident that our language about them genuinely reports on something, rather than just replacing some more primitive behaviour or expressing a behavioural disposition. Though this objection clearly does not depend on any conception of sensations as essentially private or epistemological foundational entities, the thought that some legitimate uses of sensation-language are genuinely reporting uses gestures toward the immediacy of primitive items of experience, their possibility of issuing in, and justifying, immediately descriptive language about them that does not depend on inference from any further or more basic premises. It had been just this feature of immediacy that Ryle’s programme, committed to analysing mental concepts in terms of the ‘logical geography’ of their grammatical interrelationships as exhibited in ordinary use, was unable to capture. For the commitment of Ryle’s analyses of public language to yield clarifications never referring to any essentially private objects left these analyses unable to countenance even language referring to items that are private in the epistemologically and ontologically unproblematic sense of Place and Smart’s theory. As had happened before, and would happen again, the immediacy of experience made impossible any complete analytical description of it in terms of the logical, formal, structural, or grammatical interrelations between concepts. The result was a partial change in subject and a shift in methodology away from the primarily linguistically-oriented analyses of Ryle and the analytic heritage, and toward a more empirically-minded style of explanation.
The Identity Theory of Place and Smart itself articulated a compelling picture of the mind as part of a unified, physically describable and empirically discoverable world. Philosophers of mind found the picture congenial both because it promised to integrate the mind into the unified order of scientific explanation and because it did so without the implausibilities of Ryle’s seemingly behaviourist treatment of consciousness. But though the Identity Theory sought to place the mind and the referents of mental entities within the physical world, it failed by itself to articulate, even in sketchy terms, what a physicalist description of mental states might actually look like. The ‘functional state identity theory’ or ‘functionalism’ of Putnam, Fodor, and David Lewis provided the needed articulation in several ways (see Putnam, 1967; Lewis, 1966; Fodor, 1965). First, by defending a conception of mental states as identical with computational or formal states, it allowed the possibility that the formal description of a mental state — the logical structure of its interrelationships with exterior events and other mental states — would be relevant to the explanation of its existence. In this way, the old analytical project of clarifying the logical structure of mental states gained a new life, freed from its exclusive dependence on Fregean truthfunctional logic and essentially linguistic analysis. Second, by making this identity of mental states with computational states a matter of their causal properties, the new style of analysis could justifiably claim to issue a fully empirical description of them, completely amenable to a physicalist ontology, and capable of solving the various problems of physical/mental causation. By combining these two strands of theory—formal description of the logic of mental states, rewritten as computational description, and a physicalist description of their ontology — functionalism brought the apparent metaphysical innocence of the Identity Theory together with the more sophisticated analytical prospects offered by formal or computational description.