A human studying the sensing of chemicals by bacteria.
A new frame of reference, which in its fundamental structuring differs radically from the structuring of the familiar western Indo-European viewpoints (logical, mathematical, scientific, philosophical, etc.), already exists. Recently, by the strategem of systematically disallowing a previously unnoticed untenable assumption encoded in the traditional Western symbolic logics, set theories, etc., in particular and in the Western 'World-View' in general, this frame of reference has generated its own, entirely non-traditional, formalized language. The Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic has accepted for publication a first paper presenting this non-standard formalized language (Hilgartner, 1975). As one of its accomplishments, this new frame of reference delivers a general theory of living. This theory purports to span the entire domain of what we call living systems, human or non-human. The author did not originally devise this new frame of reference to account for the observable 'doings' of one-celled organisms. Consequently, any effort to illustrate the generalizations of this already-existing abstract theory in terms of humanly observable bacterial behavior has the effect of experimentally testing these generalizations. In the second portion of this paper, the author shows that the new viewpoint neatly accounts, with no 'loose ends,' for the published observations concerning the sensing of chemicals by bacteria; and also proposes two new experiments. Meanwhile, there exists a special dilemma which arises whenever its adepts attempt to discuss this non-standard frame of reference with persons versed in the standard Western one. By delineating the structuring of this dilemma, in the context of a human studying the sensing of chemicals by bacteria, the author demonstrates that the untenable assumption mentioned above does underlie the traditional Western viewpoints; and this demonstration suffices to show the traditional Western 'World-View' as fundamentally flawed.
D018407:Bacterial Physiological Phenomena; D001695:Biology; D002633:Chemotaxis; D004926:Escherichia coli / Q000502:physiology; D008128:Logic; D012660:Semantics