Ullin Thomas Place (24 October 1924 – 2 January 2000), usually cited asU. T. Place, was a British philosopher and psychologist. Along withJ. J. C. Smart, he developed theidentity theory of mind. After several years at theUniversity of Adelaide, he taught for some years in the Department of Philosophy in theUniversity of Leeds.

Place was born inNorthallerton,Yorkshire. He was educated atRugby School andCorpus Christi College, Oxford. He studied under and was strongly influenced byGilbert Ryle atOxford University. There, he became acquainted withphilosophy of mind in thelogical behaviorist tradition, of which Ryle was a major exponent. Although he would later abandon logical behaviorism as a theory of the mind in favor of the type-identity theory, Place nevertheless continued to harbor sympathies toward the behavioristic approach to psychology in general. He even went so far as to defend theradical behaviorist theses ofB.F. Skinner, as expressed inVerbal Behavior, from the criticisms ofNoam Chomsky and the growing movement ofcognitive psychology. Place died inThirsk, Yorkshire.

Place, as well as J. J. C. Smart, nevertheless established his place in the annals ofanalytic philosophy by founding the theory which would eventually help to dethrone and displacephilosophical behaviorism - the identity theory. InIs Consciousness a Brain Process?, Place formulated the thesis that mental processes were not to be defined in terms of behavior; rather, one must identify them with neural states. With this bold thesis, Place became one of the fathers of the current materialistic mainstream of the philosophy of mind.

His sister,Dorothy E. Smith, was a prominent Canadian sociologist and the founder of the field ofinstitutional ethnography, and his brother,Milner Place, was one of England's leading poets.

There are actually subtle but interesting differences between the three most widely credited formulations of the type identity thesis, those of Place, Feigl and Smart which were published in several articles in the late 1950s. Place's notion of theidentity involved in the identity thesis is derived fromBertrand Russell's distinction among several types ofis statements: theis ofidentity, theis of equality and theis of predication. Place's version of the relation of identity in the so-calledidentity thesis is more accurately described as an asymmetric relation of composition. For Place, higher-level mental events are composed out of lower-level physical events and will eventually be analytically reduced to these. To the objection that "sensations" do not mean the same thing as "brain processes", Place could simply reply with the example that "lightning" does not mean the same thing as "electrical discharge" since we determine that something is lightning by looking and seeing it, whereas we determine that something is an electrical discharge through experimentation and testing. Nevertheless, "lightning is an electrical discharge" is true since the one iscomposed of the other. Similarly, "clouds are water vapor" means that "clouds are composed of droplets of water vapor" but not vice versa.

ForFeigl andSmart, on the other hand, the identity was to be interpreted as the identity between the referents of two descriptions (senses) which referred to the same thing, as in "the morning star" and "the evening star" both referring to Venus. So to the objection about the lack of equality of meaning between "sensation" and "brain process", their response was to invoke this Fregean distinction: "sensations" and "brain" processes do indeedmean different things but they refer to the same physical phenomenon. Moreover, "sensations are brain processes" is a contingent, not a necessary, identity.

• Identifying the mind. Selected papers, OUP, Oxford 2004,ISBN 0-19-516137-8
• "Is consciousness a brain process?" in:British Journal of Psychology 47 (1956), pp. 44–50
• "Skinner's Verbal Behavior - why we need it" in:Behaviorism, 1981.

• J. Franklin,Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia, 2003, ch. 9.
• D.C. Palmer,In memoriam Ullin place: 1924–2000, BEHAV ANALYST (2000) 23: 95

• Ullin Thomas Place (1924-2000). Philosopher and psychologist. The intellectual legacy of a radical empiricist, complete bibliography with download links, compiled and edited by Thomas Place.