An analog of the problem of inessential predication applies to the truthmaker criterion of ontological commitment to kinds. Consider the sentence ‘philosophers exist’, and suppose that philosophers really exist. Then it seems undeniable that ‘philosophers exist’ is ontologically committed to philosophers. Presumably, however, philosophers are not essentially philosophers. And so, given truthmaker necessitarianism, no philosopher is a truthmaker for ‘philosophers exist’: any philosopher is such that he or she could have existed in a philosopher-less world. The truthmaker criterion for kinds, then, wrongly claims that ‘philosophers exist’ is not ontologically committed to philosophers. Call this the problem of inessential generalization.