Hilgartner C A
Acta Biotheor. 1978;27(1-2):19-43. doi: 10.1007/BF00048401.
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.
一种新的参照系已然存在，其基本结构与人们熟悉的西方印欧语系观点（逻辑、数学、科学、哲学等）的结构截然不同。最近，通过系统地摒弃传统西方符号逻辑、集合论等中编码的一个先前未被注意到的站不住脚的假设这一策略，尤其是在西方“世界观”整体中，这个参照系产生了它自己的、完全非传统的形式化语言。《圣母大学形式逻辑杂志》已接受发表第一篇介绍这种非标准形式化语言的论文（希尔加特纳，1975年）。作为其成就之一，这个新的参照系提供了一种关于生命的一般理论。该理论旨在涵盖我们所称的生命系统的整个领域，包括人类或非人类。作者最初设计这个新的参照系并非是为了解释单细胞生物可观察到的“行为”。因此，任何试图根据人类可观察到的细菌行为来说明这个已然存在的抽象理论的概括的努力，都具有对这些概括进行实验检验的效果。在本文的第二部分，作者表明新观点能够完美地解释已发表的关于细菌对化学物质感知的观察结果，且毫无“破绽”；并且还提出了两个新实验。与此同时，每当其信徒试图与精通标准西方参照系的人讨论这个非标准参照系时，就会出现一个特殊的困境。通过在一个研究细菌对化学物质感知的人的背景下描绘这个困境的结构，作者证明了上述站不住脚的假设确实是传统西方观点的基础；而这一证明足以表明传统西方“世界观”存在根本缺陷。
