The brain can be thought of as a tool.

In this paper I argue that the recent tendency to elevate neuropsychology to the status of the one true scientific core of studies of people thinking, feeling, acting and perceiving is not best understood as a simple mereological fallacy, that is the fallacy of ascribing certain properties of wholes to their parts, in particular mental concepts to the material brain as a part of a person. In defending Svend Brinkmann's way of undermining the claims of neuroscience against the criticism offered by Gaeto and Cornejo of the cognitive task-brain as tool proposal, I argue that a person's brain is part of the body of that person, but that the body is not a part of a person. Hence the use of person-concepts to describe brain activity is not a mereological fallacy.

Positioning and the discursive construction of categories.

Psychological phenomena are semiotic, so the best model for understanding them must be 'conversation'. Psychiatric conversations are dominated by complaints. In dealing with them the structure of the consequential conversation must be subjected to 'positioning analysis' to reveal the dynamics of rights and duties among the speakers.

Structural explanation in chemistry and its evolving forms.

Historically, there has been a close relationship between the concepts of structure and of shape. Is the relationship a matter of fact or is it conceptual? Exploring this question with examples enables us to distinguish several senses of structure. Clearly, spatial shape is not conceptually related to constitutive structure, since a molecule may consist only of an ordered set of potentialities.