ABSTRACT
It seems obvious that the sciences do not simply produce piles of unrelated bits of knowledge, but it is much less obvious how they provide us with explanations, and how these explanations yield understanding about the processes, causes, and contents of the natural world. Perhaps the sciences explain by classifying the contents of the world into natural categories of being or what might be called ‘natural kinds’. Knowing what kind something is would then greatly inform us about what other information we can infer about it, for example knowing what natural kind it belongs to means that we know what inferences we can make about it and what generalizations apply to it as a member of that kind. Discussions over whether these natural kinds exist, what is the nature of their existence, and whether natural kinds are themselves natural kinds aim to characterize not only the kinds of things that exist in the world but also what knowledge of these categories can provide.
