APS distinguishes organisation, agency, and viability analytically while treating them as relations within one living organisation.
Organisation refers to the structured relations and ongoing activities through which biological processes collectively contribute to maintaining a living system. Within APS, Life is viability-oriented, constraint-closed organisation. Organisation is therefore not a static arrangement of components but a dynamically maintained organisation of relations and activities through which living organisation is enacted and sustained.
Agency is viability-oriented organisational activity. Living systems do not merely undergo change; their activities modulate relations with internal and external conditions in ways relevant to their continued functioning. Regulation, physiological adjustment, behaviour, environmental modification, development, and repair may all participate in such activity.
Viability concerns the conditions within which living organisation can continue. Viability does not mean simply “being alive” or “remaining alive”; it identifies the asymmetry among conditions that support, impair, or terminate the continued functioning of the organisation. Differences among states, processes, and outcomes can therefore support or undermine that continuation. APS characterises this asymmetry as biological normativity: biological normativity is viability-relative asymmetry.
Organisation, agency, and viability should not therefore be understood as successive stages, independent components, or a predetermined explanatory hierarchy. Agency is the present activity through which viability-oriented organisation is enacted, while viability specifies the conditions relative to which that organisation can continue.
Within APS, these are analytic distinctions within one living organisation. Their conceptual relationship does not by itself establish causal, temporal, ontological, or explanatory priority, and any proposed dependency among them must be specified and assessed rather than inferred from their position within APS architecture.