He even went so far as to defend the radical behaviorist theses of B.F. Skinner, as expressed in Verbal Behavior, from the criticisms of Noam Chomsky and the growing movement of cognitive psychology.
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 of institutional 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.
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.