Philosophy of Biology

This article develops an APS account of semiosis as the ongoing organisation of meaningful organism–environment relations within viability-oriented evaluative activity. Semiosis is not fundamentally symbolic representation, linguistic meaning, or abstract information processing, but the process through which differences become biologically significant for organised persistence. Living systems continuously regulate themselves relative to conditions affecting viability, and semiosis emerges wherever such differences are integrated into continuity-preserving evaluative organisation. APS situates semiosis within a broader explanatory grammar linking viability, function, normativity, evaluation, meaning, information, representation, and cognition, while showing how meaningful relations are organised across interacting biological scales and temporal horizons. Semiosis therefore emerges from organised persistence while simultaneously contributing to its maintenance, regulation, and reorganisation.

This article develops the APS account of meaning as stabilised evaluative significance within viability-oriented organised persistence. Meaning is not fundamentally symbolic representation, linguistic semantics, or abstract informational encoding. Living systems regulate activity relative to differences affecting persistence, and meaning emerges wherever evaluative organisation stabilises those differences within continuity-preserving biological activity. APS therefore grounds meaning, information, representation, and cognition within organised persistence rather than abstract symbol manipulation or detached computational formalism.

Many of biology's most important concepts—including purpose, agency, cognition, meaning, and mind—remain conceptually contested despite substantial empirical progress. APS argues that these difficulties often arise not from a lack of evidence but from conceptual instability. This article proposes that biological understanding advances through two related processes: naturalisation and conceptual closure. Naturalisation reconstructs difficult concepts as features of organised living systems, while conceptual closure stabilises those concepts within a coherent explanatory framework. Together these processes transform phenomena that appear ambiguous, metaphysical, or irreducible into scientifically intelligible objects of inquiry. By examining how APS approaches purpose, agency, cognition, and meaning, the article argues that the framework functions as a programme of integrative naturalisation. More broadly, it suggests that APS can be understood as a systematic effort to render life scientifically intelligible, providing a methodological foundation for future investigations into mind, selfhood, awareness, and the wider Matter-to-Mind research programme.

Throughout the history of biology and philosophy, researchers have repeatedly attempted to identify the defining principle of life. Some have emphasised form, purpose, energy, metabolism, self-production, autonomy, organisation, or information. This article examines these major traditions as competing explanatory grammars—different ways of making life intelligible. By comparing the explanatory problems each tradition sought to solve, it traces a long intellectual search for the essence of life and situates APS within that ongoing conversation.

APS is a developing philosophy of biology grounded in the view that life is viability-oriented, constraint-closed organisation. This article presents the philosophical foundations of the framework, including its ontology of organised persistence, its explanatory grammar of Agency–Process–Scale, its account of biological explanation, and its proposed architecture linking life, cognition, Mind, and Meaning. It situates APS in relation to major contemporary traditions in philosophy of biology while distinguishing established commitments from ongoing areas of theoretical development.