APS does not explain living systems through a single privileged principle or explanatory level. Instead, it organises biological explanation through a coordinated set of concepts that illuminate different aspects of viability-oriented organised persistence.

  • Viability identifies the conditions under which organised persistence can succeed or fail.

  • Persistence describes the ongoing regeneration of organised activity across time.

  • Constraint closure explains the reciprocal organisation through which living systems sustain themselves.

  • Coupling describes the reciprocal relations through which systems and processes dynamically influence one another.

  • Scale-coupling explains how organisation is integrated across spatial and temporal scales.

  • Biological agency describes the active regulation of viability-oriented organisation.

  • Semiosis explains how viability-relevant differences become biologically meaningful within organised activity.

  • Resolution identifies the explanatory granularity at which organisation is described or analysed.

These concepts do not function independently. Together they form an organisational grammar through which living systems can be understood as viability-oriented, dynamically organised, and continuously sustained across time.

APS therefore approaches life not as a collection of isolated components, but as organised persistence emerging through the coordinated interaction of agency, process, scale, meaning, and organisation.