The distinction between physical and chemical change is actually not as cut and dried as one might think. Sure, what happens to copper in nitric acid is very different from what happens to sugar in water. But what about, say, the process that occurs when a steel strip is cleaned (basically removing carbon from the surface) in an atmosphere containing carbon dioxide?
In this process the carbon "reacts" with the carbon dioxide according to:
$\ce{C(s) +CO2 <=> 2CO}, \Delta H>0$
where we note the equilibrium; the gas can become "saturated usually with a lot of the carbon dioxide "solvent" left over. As indicated by the sign of the enthalpy change, this is an endothermic reaction, and more carbon reacts upon heating. If we were to allow the strip to cool the carbon could redeposit (it may also do so on cooler parts of the furnace). From that point of view the process begins to look more like sugar + water (which is also reversed by cooling) than copper + nitric acid. Moreover, we could interpret the carbon monoxide as carrying the carbon in a gas-phase solvated form, from which the carbon can be un-solvated again if precipitation is made favorable (e.g. by cooling), again something we would associate more with a physical change than the chemical one that the reaction above describes.
So is dissolution a physical or a chemical change? Depending on the system it could be either ... or both.