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Mechanisms, Types, and Abstractions

Machamer, Darden, and Craver’s account of the nature and role of mechanisms in the special sciences has been very influential. Unfortunately, a confusing array of ontic, epistemic, and pragmatic distinctions is required to individuate their mechanisms, mechanism schemata, and mechanism sketches. I diagnose this as a conflation of token-level causal relations with type-level relations. I propose instead that a mechanism is an abstraction that relates entity types and activity types on the model of a directed graph. Mechanisms have an ontic status distinct from the causal chains of token entities and token activities that instantiate them.