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Erratum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

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Correction
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Philosophy of Science , Volume 85 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 175
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits non-commercial reuse of the work with attribution. Permission for commercial reuse must be obtained from the publisher.
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Copyright © 2018 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved.

Eduardo J. Martinez’s “Stable Property Clusters and Their Grounds” (in vol. 84, no. 5, December 2017) contained an editorial error in the Introduction at the time of publication. The article was corrected in the HTML and online PDF on December 20, 2017.

Outside of the neater confines of certain paradigm cases, philosophers of science have struggled to account for the myriad, messy natural kinds in fields such as biology. Matthew Slater provides a response to this challenge with an account of natural kinds as stable property cluster (SPC) kinds. This account rejects what Slater calls the grounding claim, which states that the epistemic value of natural kinds depends on the existence of some ground, such as an essence or mechanism, that binds the kind’s properties together. In this article, I argue that we should retain the grounding claim in the philosophical analysis of natural kinds. Using two test cases from academic medicine, I show that grounds are genuinely explanatory of scientific epistemic practices and argue that the SPC account should not go without an account of grounds.