Abstract

There is a persistent tension in psychiatry between explicit endorsement of pluralistic approaches and an implicit tendency toward eliminative reductionism. I argue that machine metaphors shape concepts of mechanism and mechanistic explanation in ways that promote this tendency. Even minimal mechanism notions - designed to avoid problematic metaphysical assumptions - create an explanatory vacuum that machine-metaphorical defaults readily fill: practitioners need answers that minimal mechanism deliberately leaves open, and entrenched machine associations provide cognitively available defaults. Features of psychiatry exacerbate this dynamic, including clinical decision-making pressures and psychiatry's interdisciplinary status. This vulnerability has implications for mechanistic concepts and explanations beyond psychiatry.