Conventional framing
In many scientific contexts, explanatory assumptions remain implicit rather than explicitly articulated. Biology, in particular, often operates with mixed explanatory grammars, drawing on concepts such as genes, mechanisms, selection, or systems without clearly specifying how these relate within a unified framework. As a result, different explanations may rely on incompatible assumptions about what entities are fundamental, what counts as a cause, and what constitutes an adequate explanation.
APS reframing
APS makes explanatory grammar explicit and treats it as foundational to biological theory. Explanatory grammar does not describe particular mechanisms or processes, but the conditions under which biological phenomena become intelligible as objects of explanation.
This includes:
- what counts as an entity (e.g., gene, cell, organism, process)
- what counts as a cause (e.g., mechanism, selection, constraint)
- what is taken to have explanatory priority
Taken together, these dimensions define explanatory grammar as a unified framework that integrates ontology (what exists), causation (what counts as a cause), explanatory structure (how intelligibility is organised), and explanatory direction (how explanation is oriented).
Explanatory grammar also structures explanatory direction: the orientation of explanation either toward components (analysis) or toward the organised systems within which those components function (synthesis) (see Analysis, Synthesis, and the Direction of Explanation).
In many biological traditions, analytic direction is implicitly privileged, and explanatory priority is assigned to lower-level components. This orientation underlies reductionist interpretations, in which biological phenomena are treated as fully explainable in terms of their constituent parts.
APS reframes this by grounding explanatory grammar in viability-oriented, constraint-closed organisation. Biological explanation is therefore organised around agency, process, and scale: living systems are understood as actively sustaining and modulating the conditions of their own persistence through constraint-closed organisation enacted across continuous processes and interacting scales.
In this way, reductionism is not rejected but re-situated: it reflects a partial explanatory grammar that captures material constitution but omits the organisational conditions required for biological intelligibility.
Key Point
Explanatory grammar defines the conditions of biological intelligibility—what counts as real, what counts as a cause, and how explanation is oriented—grounding both the structure of biological explanation and the limits of reductionist accounts.