Abstract
PHYSICALISM, relative to the mind-body identity thesis, has been fairly characterized as the thesis that a person, with all his psychological attributes, is nothing over and above his body, with all its physical attributes .1 Apart from the question of whether it is true, it is not entirely clear what would be sufficient to establish the truth of the thesis. I wish, in fact, to consider here, the difficulty of defending it in respects that appear not to have been regularly admitted in the literature. The signal benefit of physicalism, construed in the manner given, is that it appears to obviate an entire set of difficultiessaid to bear on the application of Leibniz's law-concerning what is attributable to mental states and physical states, to pains and brain states, for instance. For, what has regularly been noticed -as by J. J. C. Smart,2 Thomas Nagel,3 Jerry Fodor4-is that it seems that we cannot independently ascribe physical location to pains (the supporting arguments, here, tend to vary somewhat), whereas we seem to be able to locate physical states straightforwardly. Nagel, for one, summarizes the strategy conveniently:
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