4.6 ARE OBJECTS OF EXPLANATION OBJECTS OF EXPERIENCE?
In all these instances, the corresponding object of explanation was made necessary by that skipping over things which characterizes the modern scientific comportment and was, in fact, co-posited with the advanced determination which implemented the skipping. Indeed, when Galileo posited that, in the absence of any obstacle, an object would proceed forever in a rectilinear uniform motion along an infinite horizontal plane, he was not reflecting what the objects encountered in experience were manifestly telling him; he was rather axiomatically deciding in advance that a mechanical object was that object which moved in the fashion postulated by him and put that axiom at the basis of a new science. In fact, since there are no infinite planes in our experience and obstacles obtain everywhere, objects in our experience do not actually ever move in the postulated way. Therefore, by thus skipping over the objects of our experience, Galileo necessarily and simultaneously raised the question concerning the reason for that difference. In other words, it is precisely because motion in the world is never quite rectilinear and uniform that the question of why objects of experience do not move in that way comes up. Newton answered that question by asserting that other objects were responsible for that difference. Specifically, he conceived of an object of explanation called gravitational force which produces the observed difference from the hypothesized uniform and rectilinear motion and he thus co-posited that object with the principle of inertia.
Similarly, light became necessary once we axiomatically took visibility to be a reflective process in which luminous bodies were responsible for the visibility of dark ones precisely because something had to discharge that responsibility. The object of explanation called heat became necessary the very moment we conceived of the manifest lack of thermal activity between two bodies of the same temperature as a state of thermal equilibrium precisely because equilibrium is a balance which requires communication. And constituents of matter became necessary when we assumed that the source of the Brownian movement was located inside the fluid precisely because an inside is always nothing but an outside. Therefore, all these objects of explanation are just as much of a mente concipio as the original mente concipio involved in the axiomatic project which engendered them; they are something which man gives to himself not something which is given to him.
On this narrative then, objects of explanation cannot be objects of experience because the former we give to ourselves while the latter are simply given to us. There is an ontological difference between objects of experience and objects of explanation. But, if this inference from philosophy is correct, why is it that it came as a total surprise to the scientific community? Why was there no inkling before the early years of the 1900s that gravitational force, light, heat, electricity, and various constituents of matter were not actually the objects of experience they were taken for? Why did the fact that an electron might not be anything like a small billiard ball only became clear to the scientific community then and not before? We shall argue that, in fact, there was evidence from the very beginning of the modern scientific project that a molecule might not be anything like a particle and that an electromagnetic field might not be anything like a wave, but that circumstances conspired to hide such evidence until the turn of the last century. We substantiate our argument by examining how corpuscular theory explained Boyle’s gas law and how Maxwell’s theory of electricity and magnetism explained optical experience.