Stable Property Clusters and Their Grounds

I argue against Matthew Slater’s rejection of what he calls the grounding claim in his stable property cluster (SPC) account of natural kinds. This claim states that the epistemic value of natural kinds depends on the existence of some ground to bind together a kind’s properties. Using two test cases from academic medicine, I show that grounds are genuinely explanatory of scientific epistemic practices and that the SPC account should not do without them in its philosophical analysis of natural kinds.