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Abstraction and the Organization of Mechanisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Arnon Levy  and
William Bechtel
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Abstract

Proponents of mechanistic explanation all acknowledge the importance of organization. But they have also tended to emphasize specificity with respect to parts and operations in mechanisms. We argue that in understanding one important mode of organization—patterns of causal connectivity—a successful explanatory strategy abstracts from the specifics of the mechanism and invokes tools such as those of graph theory to explain how mechanisms with a particular mode of connectivity will behave. We discuss the connection between organization, abstraction, and mechanistic explanation and illustrate our claims by looking at an example from recent research on so-called network motifs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , April 2013 , pp. 241 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

For written and oral comments we wish to thank Uri Alon, Carl Craver, and Lindley Darden, as well as an anonymous referee for this journal.

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