Matthews, S. (2014). Philosophy of mind (Analytic). In G. Oppy & N. N. Trakakis (Eds.), A companion to philosophy in Australia and New Zealand (Second Edition, pp. 428-434; first edition 2010). Monash University Publishing.
[Citing Place (1954)]  [Citing Place (1956)]  
Citing Place (1954) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
see citations of Place (1956)
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
* One well known strand of thought, dubbed Australian materialism, properly begins in the mid 1950s with U. T. Place and J. J. C. Smart. It continues to resonate today. [...]
The work of Place, Smart and Armstrong emerges from the realist and empiricist stirrings in Australasian philosophy in the early part of the twentieth century. [...]
In 1950, J. J. C. Smart, a student of Ryle’s in Oxford, took up the chair in philosophy at the University of Adelaide. He appointed U. T. Place and C. B. Martin; the former also had come under the influence of Ryle, but was unsatisfied with Ryle’s scepticism about the inner causes of our mental life. Martin’s influence cannot be underestimated here. For Martin is credited with the truthmaker principle: a statement requires the existence of some fact, event, or property in order that it should be true. This clearly sits ill with Rylean behavourist analyses of mental concepts, for statements explaining mental goings-on in physical terms are conceptually ruled out—that would be a ‘category mistake’ according to Ryle—and so such statements, it turns out, are really just ways of speaking about dispositions to behave or patterns of behaviour. The Adelaide philosophers wanted a theory that de-bunked the Cartesian myth; they wanted a theory that was scientifically respectable; and they wanted a theory that, contra Ryle, acknowledged the reality of inner causes. Place was the first one out of the blocks. In 1954 he published ‘The Concept of Heed’, which was a refutation of the dispositional account. The final sentences of the article included the following, for-the-time, fabulously tantalising and veiled promissory note. It read:
'What are these curious occurrences within ourselves on which we can give a running commentary as they occur?' Lack of space precludes any discussion of this fascinating problem here. It is my belief, however, that the logical objections to the statement ‘consciousness is a process in the brain’ are no greater than the logical objections which might be raised to the statement ‘lightning is a motion of electrical charges’.
Place then published, in 1956, ‘Is Consciousness a Brain Process?’ The view put forward there, as with the 1954 article, accepted some Rylean analyses of cognitive and conative states, but the great advance was the suggestion that notions like consciousness, experience, sensation and mental imagery had to involve internal processes. The sticking point was finding a way of explaining the identification of something like a mental image with a neural state that did not sound instantly absurd. Cartesians in particular, wedded to the idea that such mental items as these are always fully transparent, could hardly take on board the identification. Am I aware of a brain process when aware of a mental image? Place thought that this assumption would constitute what he called a phenomenological fallacy.
J. J. C. Smart, in ‘Sensations and Brain Processes’ (1959b), carrying further this line of thought, said we needed a distinction between what we mean by statements involving, e.g. reports of sensations, and the facts lying behind such identities. Here we encounter the famous and controversial idea of contingent identity statements. The strategy was to point to other examples of natural identities, as Place had intimated in 1954. The task was then to offer a positive account of how the identities could be explained. [...]
Smart had argued for the view that, as a matter of contingent fact, sensations were strictly identical to brain processes, and in the acknowledgements to A Materialist Theory of the Mind Armstrong cites Smart as the person who converted him to this view. He goes on: ‘for the most part I conceive myself only to be filling out a step in the argument to which [Smart and Place] devoted little attention: the account of the concept of mind’ (p. xi). This modesty, however, disguises what in Armstrong was a more ambitious program. Although both Smart and Armstrong were keen in their philosophical analysis on topic-neutral specifications of what was to play the empirical role in that analysis, Armstrong diverged in two ways from his predecessor. First, he wanted to move away from Rylean behaviourism which featured in the analysis, at least in limited form. Second, he wanted a more general account of mental states, not one focussed on a subset of the mental such as sensations. [...]
Armstrong thanks C. B. Martin for making him aware of the importance of the role of causality in the characterisation of mental concepts. [...]
Armstrong took his brief, then, to be an analysis of mental concepts in which it was assumed that mental states were identical with brain states; hence the name Central State Materialism. Armstrong’s main argument has two steps. First, he offers a ‘logical or conceptual analysis of the mental concepts’, as he likes to put it. This is a causal analysis to the effect that mental states are states apt for producing a range of behaviour and states apt for being the outcome of a range of stimuli. Second, the question arises as to what in fact plays the causal roles assigned within this functional analysis, and that is a matter of empirical discovery. Armstrong’s view, then, can be taken as an early expression of what is sometimes called multiple realisability. (David Lewis had almost simultaneously (1966) arrived at the same conclusion.) For as a philosophical treatment of the mind-body problem it retains elements of the topic-neutrality evident in Place and Smart, since, in theory, causal realisers besides brain states would also be apt to play the mental functional roles.