Architectural Dependency is the APS-specific interpretation of pathway architecture according to which an APS arrow represents a defeasible dependency hypothesis rather than evidence, a uniform causal relation, chronology, conceptual implication, or established fact.
The term architectural refers to the organised pattern of relationships proposed by an APS pathway. The term dependency indicates that a claim is being made about how specified relata are connected. Architectural Dependency does not determine in advance what kind of dependency obtains. A pathway relation may be causal, constitutive, enabling, constraint-based, structural, spatial, temporal, historical, conceptual, or mixed.
Architectural Dependency is not an additional analytic projection alongside Agency, Process, and Scale. Agency, Process, and Scale are analytic projections of one viability-oriented, constraint-closed organisation rather than independent components of reality. Architectural Dependency instead concerns the dependency commitments represented within and among APS explanatory pathways.
Individual pathway arrows must therefore be unpacked as dependency hypotheses whose relation type, material or argumentative basis, evidence, alternatives, scope, and failure conditions can be made explicit. Architectural Dependency identifies these commitments; it does not itself establish that they are correct.
Assessment of such claims is conducted through the framework-neutral Dependency-Hypothesis Audit. Architectural Dependency therefore identifies what must be assessed in an APS pathway, while the Dependency-Hypothesis Audit specifies how that assessment is conducted.
Architectural Dependency allows APS pathways concerning organised persistence, biological evaluation, significance, cognition, mind, selfhood, meaning, morality, and other forms of biological and social organisation to function as explicit and revisable explanatory architectures rather than as self-validating diagrams.