APS treats organisation as a real and scientifically investigable feature of living systems.
Organisation does not refer to hidden vital forces, supernatural properties, or mysterious holistic essences. It refers to the materially implemented relations, regulatory dynamics, constraints, and processes through which living systems maintain and re-establish conditions required for continued functioning.
Within APS, living organisation is viability-oriented and constraint-closed. Organisation is ongoing activity rather than a static arrangement of components, and its biological consequences can be investigated through the material processes by which that organisation is enacted and sustained.
Organisation is therefore not opposed to mechanistic explanation. Mechanistic approaches may provide substantive explanations of the entities, activities, interactions, and causal organisation through which biological phenomena occur.
APS makes living organisation an explicit explanatory target without assuming that organisational explanation replaces, contains, or is inherently superior to mechanistic explanation. Where organisational and mechanistic accounts address the same target, their relative explanatory contribution requires comparison.