APS Box — Explanation Is Not Reduction

APS rejects the idea that explanation consists solely in reducing phenomena to smaller physical parts.

Reduction can reveal important mechanisms and material processes, but biological intelligibility also depends on organisation, regulation, scale relations and continuity conditions.

To explain a living system is not only to identify its components, but to understand how those components are organised so that viability is sustained across time.

Organisation is therefore explanatorily real.

APS does not oppose mechanism or material analysis. Instead, it argues that biological explanation requires understanding how mechanisms participate in continuity-preserving organised persistence.