Understanding why complex systems persist under disturbance while others collapse is a central challenge across the natural and social sciences. Research on this problem has emerged across several intellectual traditions, including cybernetics, resilience ecology, viability theory, predictive processing, and institutional governance studies. However, these traditions have largely evolved in parallel, resulting in fragmented conceptual frameworks for analyzing adaptive persistence.
This paper proposes a unifying framework — the viability grammar — that identifies seven structural elements governing the persistence of complex adaptive systems: constraints, margins, optionality, disturbances, perception, regulation, and system state. These elements interact through a set of irreducible triadic relations that together define a relational syntax of viability. Building on this structure, the paper advances a triadic generative hypothesis suggesting that the viability grammar may emerge from the interaction of three fundamental system dimensions: constraints, perception, and regulation. Disturbances act as forcing fields that perturb system trajectories, while margins and optionality arise from the relationship between system state and constraint geometry.
Interpreting these relations geometrically reveals that adaptive systems evolve within constraint-defined state spaces in which regulatory actions and disturbances shape system trajectories. Evidence from physical, biological, ecological, and institutional systems suggests that the same structural architecture recurs across multiple levels of organization. The viability grammar therefore offers a common conceptual language for analyzing resilience, adaptation, and system collapse across domains. The framework provides a foundation for the development of a broader interdisciplinary research program aimed at understanding the conditions under which complex adaptive systems remain viable within the limits imposed by their environments.
