The Agency–Process–Scale (APS) framework is a structured approach to understanding life, cognition, and biological organisation. It defines living systems as viability-oriented, constraint-closed organisation and develops a unified explanatory grammar based on agency, process, and scale.
APS integrates conceptual analysis, empirical relevance, and theoretical development into a single framework. The APS Publishing Platform presents this work through canonical definitions, peer-reviewed articles, and ongoing research streams.
Origins of the Framework
The APS framework developed from a series of philosophical and theoretical investigations into biology, cognition, and organisation undertaken by Roger Spencer between 2020 and 2025.
These works, originally published on plantspeopleplanet.au, examined the limitations of gene-centric, mechanistic, and representational accounts of life, and progressively articulated an alternative explanatory grammar grounded in viability-oriented organisation.
The framework was formally introduced in:
Spencer RD (2025). Biological agency as the context for plant cognition. Zenodo preprint. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16938193
APS now continues as an integrated research program, unifying conceptual development, empirical interpretation, and theoretical synthesis within a single framework.