Mechanism Is Not Meaning
One of psychology’s most persistent confusions is the belief that identifying a mechanism is equivalent to explaining a phenomenon. This confusion is understandable. Mechanisms are concrete, traceable, and amenable to experimental manipulation. They promise causal clarity. Meaning, by contrast, is relational, context-sensitive, and resistant to isolation. Yet the two are not interchangeable. A mechanism describes how something happens; meaning concerns what that happening signifies within a lived psychological world. Conflating the two produces explanations that are technically impressive and experientially thin.
The ascendancy of mechanistic explanation reflects psychology’s aspiration to align itself with the natural sciences. Mechanisms offer a language of causation that appears universal and value-neutral. Neural circuits fire, neurotransmitters modulate, cognitive processes execute operations. These descriptions travel well across contexts and lend themselves to cumulative research. Meaning does not behave this way. It shifts with history, culture, identity, and narrative. For a discipline anxious about rigor, mechanism feels safer.
This preference has shaped how psychological success is defined. Explanations that specify underlying processes are treated as deeper than those that interpret experience. To explain why someone acts as they do is increasingly taken to mean identifying the mechanism that produced the behavior. The question of what the action means to the person performing it is treated as secondary, subjective, or epiphenomenal.
Yet this hierarchy is philosophically fragile. Wilhelm Dilthey drew a sharp distinction between explanation and understanding, arguing that human sciences require interpretive frameworks irreducible to causal mechanism. To explain behavior causally is not to understand it as action. Understanding involves grasping how experience is organized from within, how events are situated in a person’s narrative and value system. Psychology’s difficulty arises when it tries to do the former while claiming to have achieved the latter.
The problem is not that mechanisms are irrelevant to meaning. They are enabling conditions. Neural and cognitive processes make experience possible. But they do not determine what experience is about. A neural account of fear may describe activation patterns and physiological responses. It does not tell us why a particular situation is feared, what is at stake for the individual, or how that fear fits into a broader life context. Those questions are not answered by adding more mechanistic detail.
This distinction becomes especially clear in clinical and case-based contexts. Two individuals may exhibit identical physiological responses to a stimulus while experiencing it in radically different ways. For one, the response may signal threat; for another, excitement; for a third, obligation or shame. The mechanism is constant; the meaning is not. Treating the mechanism as the explanation collapses these differences into noise.
Cognitive science has repeatedly grappled with this issue. Jerry Fodor’s critique of reductionism emphasized that psychological explanation operates at a level of intentional description that cannot be eliminated without loss. Beliefs, desires, and intentions are not reducible to their physical realizations because their explanatory force depends on their content. A belief matters because of what it is about, not merely because of how it is instantiated.
Despite this, contemporary psychology often treats content as something to be inferred from mechanism rather than as something to be interpreted in its own right. Meaning is redescribed as representation, value as reward signal, purpose as goal state. These translations are productive within certain research programs, but they risk mistaking formal equivalence for experiential identity. A reward signal is not the same thing as value as lived.
The drive toward mechanistic sufficiency also shapes intervention logic. If a problem is explained mechanistically, it is assumed that altering the mechanism will resolve the problem. This assumption holds in some cases and fails in others. Changing cognitive processes may alter symptoms without altering meaning. Neural modulation may shift affect without reorganizing identity or narrative. When interventions succeed mechanistically but fail existentially, psychology often lacks the language to account for the discrepancy.
The persistence of this discrepancy has led to recurring cycles of disappointment. Each new mechanistic advance promises to finally explain complex psychological phenomena. When it falls short, the response is rarely to question the explanatory frame. Instead, the search for a deeper or more precise mechanism continues. Meaning remains deferred, always just beyond the next level of analysis.
Philosophers of mind have long warned against this deferral. Hubert Dreyfus argued that human understanding is fundamentally situated and cannot be captured by formal rule-based systems alone. Meaning arises from embodied engagement with the world, not from internal symbol manipulation detached from context. Psychology’s mechanistic turn often brackets this insight in favor of tractability.
This bracketing has costs. It narrows the kinds of questions psychology feels authorized to ask. Questions about purpose, value, and significance are reframed as questions about process efficiency or error correction. The discipline becomes adept at explaining how systems function and less adept at explaining what those functions are for in a human sense.
None of this requires rejecting mechanistic explanation. It requires situating it. Mechanisms explain constraints and affordances. They tell us what is possible and how it unfolds. Meaning explains orientation. It tells us why something matters, how it is integrated into a life, and what it demands of the person experiencing it. These explanatory modes address different dimensions of the same phenomenon.
A psychologically mature theory would resist collapsing one into the other. It would recognize that mechanism without meaning yields hollow explanation, while meaning without mechanism risks unfounded speculation. The challenge is not to choose between them, but to articulate their relationship clearly and honestly.
Psychology’s future coherence depends on its ability to keep this distinction alive. As methods grow more powerful and mechanisms more precise, the temptation to declare explanation complete will intensify. Resisting that temptation requires remembering that psychological life is not only caused, but interpreted. Mechanism makes experience possible. Meaning makes it human.
Letter to the Reader
If you have ever felt that a mechanistic explanation answered a question while leaving something essential untouched, trust that reaction. Over time, what becomes clear is that explanation and understanding answer different demands.
Learning psychology well means learning when a mechanism clarifies and when it merely relocates the question. Meaning does not disappear when we explain how something works. It waits to be addressed on its own terms.