ABSTRACT
Treating species as stable cohesive units presupposes what the Biological Species Concept and other conceptions of species try to explain – the nature of this stability, cohesion, or unity. The claim that they are stable cohesive units suggests that there is some mechanism of stability or some underlying relationship or substance responsible for its maintenance. As such, this means that accurate attributions of specieshood ultimately depend on accurate metaphysical presuppositions, which are themselves tacit in the putative explanations of stability that are adopted. But, stability is liable to be misattributed if the mechanisms of stability are erroneously determined. Stability cannot be used to determine whether or not the clusters themselves are natural. This is because any kind attribution that relies on these clusters is anchored to a particular metaphysical picture of the world that it takes to be natural without being able to arbitrate between different candidate pictures of the world. Several new accounts purport to offer metaphysically neutral alternatives to Richard Boyd’s Homeostatic Property Cluster Theory. This chapter provides an argument for why – even if we adopt a metaphysically neutral account – we still need to consider cases where views about the metaphysical grounds of stable property clustering have resulted in errors of natural kind attribution.
