Mentalistic Language in Biology — Why It Persists and How APS Clarifies It

Why Mentalistic Language Persists in Biology

One of the strongest sources of resistance to the Agency–Process–Scale (APS) framework does not come from data, experiments, or formal theory. It comes from language.

Many readers instinctively recoil when terms such as biological agency, purpose, decision-making, preference, or cognition are used to describe bacteria, plants, or cells. These words feel irredeemably human. They seem to belong to conscious deliberation, inner experience, or psychological life. When applied to non-human organisms, the language can sound anthropomorphic, metaphorical, or simply confused.

This reaction is understandable. But APS argues that the problem does not lie in biology overreaching—it lies in a historical mismatch between language and theory. Terms that originated in human psychology have been pressed into service to describe biological organisation long before we had a coherent account of what those terms actually track.

APS does not deny this tension. It explains it.

The Source of the Discomfort

The phrase mentalistic language (or cognitive metaphor) is often used pejoratively in biology and cognitive science. It refers to terms that appear to presuppose inner mental states: intentions, beliefs, goals, preferences, and reasons.

Critics worry that such language:

• illegitimately projects human consciousness onto non-human systems
• obscures mechanistic explanation
• or reintroduces teleology under a different name

APS agrees with the concern—but not with the conclusion.

The mistake is to assume that these terms must refer to conscious mental contents. Historically, many did. But their scientific usefulness has never depended on that assumption.

In practice, biological science already relies on this language:

• cells regulate
• plants anticipate drought
• bacteria choose metabolic pathways
• immune systems recognise threats
• organisms value some states over others

These usages persist because they point to real organisational regularities—not because scientists believe cells are thinking like humans.

APS therefore asks:

What must a system be like, organisationally, for these descriptions to be objectively warranted?

From Inner States to Organised Activity

APS does not begin with psychology. It begins with viability.

More precisely, APS begins with viability-oriented, constraint-closed biological organisation—the condition under which a system maintains and regenerates the constraints that sustain its own persistence.

From this follow three consequences:

• some states are better than others for the system
• the system must actively regulate its own conditions
• failure is not merely malfunction—it is loss of existence

These are not metaphors. They are organisational facts.

APS therefore treats biological agency, cognition, purpose, and value not as mental properties, but as ways of describing how viability-oriented systems are organised in time.

This shift—from inner experience to organisational necessity—allows mentalistic terms to be naturalised without being reduced to behaviour or dismissed as metaphor.

Agency Is Not a Property

Agency is often spoken of as if it were a property that organisms “have,” like size or strength. This is misleading.

A property is something a system can possess or lack while remaining the same kind of thing. Agency does not fit this pattern. Remove viability-oriented biological organisation and you do not get an organism without agency—you get a dead system.

Agency is therefore not an attribute added to an otherwise complete entity. It is the organised activity through which a system sustains its own persistence.

Treating biological agency as a property leads to predictable errors:

• inferring agency from behaviour alone
• grading it by appearance
• attributing it metaphorically to non-living systems

Treating biological agency as organised activity leads to a different approach:

• agency must be diagnosed, not inferred
• grounded in viability-oriented constraint modulation
• inseparable from persistence, normativity, and failure

Functional Equivalence Without Conceptual Collapse

APS uses mentalistic language under a strict principle: functional equivalence.

Functional equivalence does not imply:

• identical mechanisms
• identical experiences
• conceptual collapse

It means:

If systems must solve the same organisational problem to persist, their solutions can be described using a shared vocabulary—provided their implementations are not conflated.

APS therefore distinguishes:

• human-specific cognition (conscious, symbolic, reflective)
• biological cognition (viability-oriented regulation and evaluation)

Reinterpreting the Mentalistic Lexicon

APS clarifies commonly used terms by grounding them in biological organisation rather than psychology:

• Agency — Viability-oriented activity through which a system sustains its own persistence
• Cognition — Evaluation of environmental differences relative to viability
• Intelligence — Effectiveness of problem-solving under viability constraints
• Purpose — Organisation of activity toward continued viability
• Decision-making / Preference — Differentiation between alternatives with distinct viability outcomes
• Sentience / Consciousness — Not required for biological agency or cognition; open empirical questions

In APS, agency is foundational, while cognition and intelligence are derived organisational capacities, and consciousness and sentience remain contingent and empirically constrained.

Why This Is Not Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism attributes human-specific properties where they do not belong. APS does the opposite.

It:

• removes unnecessary psychological assumptions
• identifies the minimal organisational features involved
• applies terms only where those features are present

This is not metaphorical language. It is conceptual clarification.

Avoiding cognitive language altogether does not increase rigour. It often obscures the evaluative and goal-directed organisation that characterises living systems.

Why the Language Persists—and Should

Mentalistic language persists in biology because living systems are not passive mechanisms.

Their activity is:

• self-maintaining
• evaluative
• organised around continued existence

APS does not replace mechanistic explanation. It situates mechanism within viability-oriented organisation.

When we say a system “decides,” APS interprets:

the system differentiates between alternatives relative to its persistence

When we say a system “knows,” APS interprets:

the system retains information that modulates future viability

The language survives because it points to something real. APS clarifies what that is.

The Payoff: Clarity Without Reduction

By grounding mentalistic terms in biological organisation rather than psychology, APS:

• removes the intuition that biology is smuggling minds into cells
• preserves continuity between life and mind without collapsing them
• makes explicit the normativity inherent in living systems

It allows biology to describe life as it is:

• active
• self-maintaining
• normatively structured
• oriented toward its own persistence

The language was never the problem.

The missing theory was.

APS provides that theory.

Key Point

Mentalistic terms in biology do not introduce psychology into life—they describe the organisational features of systems whose continued existence depends on their own activity.