APS does not organise inquiry around a single privileged explanatory principle or level. It uses a related set of concepts to distinguish different questions concerning viability-oriented living organisation and organised persistence.
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Viability identifies conditions relevant to whether living organisation can continue functioning and persist.
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Persistence concerns the continuation and re-establishment of organised activity across time.
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Constraint closure identifies an APS organisational commitment concerning the reciprocal maintenance of constraints involved in living organisation.
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Coupling describes materially realised relations through which systems, processes, or conditions influence one another.
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Scale-coupling directs attention to materially implemented relations among spatial and temporal extents relevant to a particular explanandum.
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Biological agency is viability-oriented organisational activity.
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Semiosis belongs to an APS research pathway investigating how viability-relevant differences may acquire biological significance; its stronger dependency claims require independent assessment.
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Resolution identifies the explanatory granularity at which organisation is described or analysed.
These concepts do not have identical functions or evidential status, and their inclusion within APS does not make each concept necessary for every biological explanation.
Agency, Process, and Scale have a more specific architectural role: they are complementary, target-sensitive analytic projections of the same living organisation rather than components, levels, stages, or independent causes.
The concepts collected here therefore provide different ways of formulating and investigating APS questions about living organisation. Their conceptual integration within the framework does not by itself establish additional explanatory power, biological truth, or superiority over independently established explanations.