Jaap Van Brakel

While in the research area known,as ’philosophy of science' there is a growing interest in separate disciplines of the empirical sciences, applied sciences and even technologies, one can find hardly any reference to the discipline of chemistry other than some preliminary discussions of chemical concepts or studies concerning the rational reconstruction of the history of chemistry. No analyses, which might be called 'philosophy of chemistry’ can be found to date. It is hoped that this review paper on what has been published on the philosophy of chemistry will show that chemistry is a philosophically rich field. After an introduction, in section 2, a more detailed classification is given of the various areas from which a (marginal) interest in the philosophy of chemistry has emerged.In section 3 there is a review of the opinions on the subject matter of chemistry, be it straightforward definition or indications of the relation to other natural sciences, in particular physics. In section 4 publications on the philosophy of chemistry are reviewed which fit the conventional format of the philosophy of science (discussing laws, theories,explanations, models). In section 5 some of the literature on the concept of chemical species is reviewed. In section 6 and 7 a review of the literature on the concepts of chemical structure and chemical reactions is presented.

Probably colour is the best worked-out example of allegedly neurophysiologically innate response categories determining percepts and percepts determining concepts, and hence biology fixing the basic categories implicit in the use of language. In this paper I argue against this view and I take C. L. Hardin's Color for Philosophers [1988] as my main target. I start by undermining the view that four unique hues stand apart from all other colour shades (Section 2) and the confidence that the solar spectrum is naturally divided into four categories (Section 3). For such categories to be truly universal, they have to be true for all peoples and in Section 4 I show that Berlin and Kay's [1969] widely quoted theory of basic colour categories is not sufficiently supported to lend it any credibility.Having disposed of the view that inspection of language or ‘pure’ perception unveils the universal colour categories. I turn to neurophysiological and psychophysical theories of colour vision to see whether they provide a more solid basis for deciding what the innate response categories are. In Section 5 I show that Hardin's account of the opponent-process theory neither supports his view that ‘colour-coding’takes place early in the visual neural pathway, nor his view that knowledge of colour vision science will help us solve many philosophical mysteries about colour.In Section 6 I give a more detailed review of what is known today about the neurophysiology of colour vision and I show that there's nothing in the brain which could be called a colour module, let alone a module with homunculi for particular basic colour categories. In Section 7 I show that psychophysical models do not support such rigid constraints on category formation either. Hence (Section 8), at least in the case of colour, current science supports a plasticity in the formation of categories that goes far beyond the requirements of those naturalistic philosophers who would like to ground primitive concepts in biology.