Smart, J. J. C. (1959). Sensations and brain processes. Philosophical Review, LXVIII, 141-156.
Note:
A revised version with new references appeared in V. C. Chappell (Ed.) (1962), The philosophy of mind. Prentice-Hall. Later reprints are of this version.
[Citing Place (1956)]  [Citing Place (1960)]  [24 referring publications by Place]  [Is replied by]  [7 reprinting collections]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
* Fn 1: This paper takes its departure from arguments to be found in U. T. Place's ‘Is Consciousness a Brain Process?' I have had the benefit of discussing Place's thesis in a good many universities in the United States and Australia, and I hope that the present paper answers objections to his thesis which Place has not considered and that it presents his thesis in a more nearly unobjectionable form. This paper is meant also to supplement the paper ‘The “Mental” and the “Physical”' by H. Feigl, which in part argues for a similar thesis to Place's.
* ... the thesis that sensations are brain processes ... does not claim that sensation statements can be translated into statements about brain processes. Fn 7: See Place, op. cit., p. 45, near top, and Feigl, op. cit., p. 390, near top.
* Objection 1 ... the things we are talking about when we describe our sensations cannot be processes in the brain.
Reply ... Consider lightning. Fn 10: See Place, op. cit., p. 47; also Feigl, op. cit., p. 438. Modern physical science tells us that lightning is a certain kind of electrical discharge due to ionization of clouds of water vapor in the atmosphere. ... Note that there are not two things: a flash of lightning and an electrical discharge. There is one thing, a flash of lightning, which is described scientifically as an electrical discharge to the earth from a cloud of ionized water molecules. ... the publicly observable physical object lightning is in fact the electrical discharge, not just a correlate of it.
In short, the reply to Objection 1 is that there can be contingent statements of the form ‘A is identical with B,' and a person may well know that something is an A without knowing that it is a B.
* Objection 4 The after-image is not in physical space. The brain-process is. So the after-image is not a brain-process.
Reply ... I am not arguing that the after-image is a brain-process, but that the experience of having an after-image is a brain-process. It is the experience which is reported in the introspective report. ... There is, in a sense, no such thing as an after-image or a sense-datum, though there is such a thing as the experience of having an image, and this
experience is described indirectly in material object language, not in phenomenal language, for there is no such thing. Fn 14: Dr J.R.Smythies claims that a sense-datum language could be taught independently of the material object language (‘A note on the fallacy of the "Phenomenological Fallacy"', British Journal of Psychology XLVII (1957), 141-4). I am not so sure of this: there must be some public criteria for a person having got a rule wrong before we can teach him the rule. I suppose someone might accidently learn color words by Dr Smythies' procedure. I am not, of course, denying that we can learn a sense datum language in the sense that we can learn to report our experience. Nor would Place deny it.
* The change from describing how things are to describing how we feel is just a change from uninhibitedly saying ‘this is so' to saying ‘this looks so.' ... From the point of view of the psychologist, the change from talking about the environment to talking about one's perceptual sensations is simply a matter of disinhibiting certain reactions. These are reactions which one normally suppresses because one has learned that in the prevailing circumstances they are unlikely to provide a good indication of the state of the environment. Fn 16: I owe this point to Place, in correspondence.
* I wish now to conclude with some remarks on the logical status of the thesis itself. U. T. Place seems to hold that it is a straight-out scientific hypothesis. Fn 19: 0p. cit. If so, he is partly right and partly wrong. ... if the issue is between ... materialism on the one hand and epiphenomenalism on the other hand, then the issue is not empirical. For there is no conceivable experiment which could decide between materialism and epiphenomenalism.