Architectural Dependency is a methodological principle used within APS to investigate the organisational conditions through which phenomena become possible.
Rather than asking only what causes an outcome, Architectural Dependency asks what forms of organisation must already be established before a phenomenon can emerge, operate, persist, or become intelligible. Dependency claims therefore concern organisational requirements rather than simple causal relationships, temporal sequences, or conceptual associations.
Within APS, Architectural Dependency functions as a methodological principle rather than an additional explanatory projection alongside Agency, Process, and Scale. Agency, Process, and Scale are complementary analytic perspectives on one viability-oriented, constraint-closed organisation. Architectural Dependency provides a method for reconstructing and evaluating relationships among forms of organisation.
Architectural Dependency is commonly expressed through pathway architectures that represent dependency hypotheses concerning organised persistence, evaluation, significance, cognition, mind, selfhood, meaning, morality, and other forms of biological and social organisation.