Mental events and the brain

When J. J. C. Smart propounded his version of the Identity Theory,1 he confessed that he found the most powerful objection to his theory to be as follows. Even if we can establish the de facto identity of mental events and neural events, do we not still have to admit the existence of mental features (to pin down one side of the de facto identity)? Are we not then still committed to something irreducibly mental? If so, we have the ‘nomological danglers’ which are incompatible with the thoroughgoing materialism Smart wishes to establish. Smart’s attempt to deal with this objection has been criticised by me2 and by others,3 and Smart has replied to some of these criticisms.4 I wish to reconsider this objection to Smart’s theory, especially in the light of some recent criticisms5 of my own paper.