Constituents of Matter / 4 / 4.7

4.7 OBSERVING AN OBJECT OF EXPLANATION

Accepting the ontological difference, however, does not settle the question concerning the Being of an object of explanation. Unfortunately, current practice provides no help with answering that question; it proceeds with the development of theory as if the underlying explanatory mechanism was not mediated by any objects at all but rather it was an abstract mathematical construct designed to connect measurable experiential quantities to each other in such a way as to reproduce observed relationships between them. Picturing an electron to oneself as an ordinary particle is neither necessary nor accurate, or so the argument goes, but is allowed only as a quaint crutch to the mind, much like Feynman diagrams help men still acquainted with manipulating objects of experience to imagine themselves manipulating abstract theoretical objects. Consequently, the ontological difference remained largely unexplored and we must therefore ask again: what, after all, is an object of explanation? What is an electron?

Under the circumstances, we should perhaps ask the object itself that question by approaching it, getting familiar with it, and experimenting with it. To do that, however, we must first have the object. But, we said that an object of explanation is a mente concipio, that is, something which we give to ourselves, not something which is given to us. How then are we to provide such an object to ourselves when we neither have the God-like power to create an object, nor are we able to construct it for subsequent observation from some experiential material lying around? We suggest that, because an object of explanation was conceived in reference to the specific experiential situation which it was designed to explain, this giving to ourselves of an object must consist in a re-creation of that very experiential situation; we shall, from now on, refer to the circumstances characterizing that situation as the manufacturing context. For instance, when we say electrons are generated by an electron gun, we do not really mean to say that the gun actually creates the electrons from within itself and then lets them be; we rather mean to say that the observed behavior of a heated filament situated at one end of a cylindrical metal sheet, both appropriately connected to electrical batteries, is well explained by the proposition, originally conceived and put forth by J.J. Thomson in 1897, according to which corpuscles with specified mass and charge had been emitted from the filament and that these electrons were then accelerated by the electric field inside the cylindrical sheet as dictated by the rules of electromagnetic theory. We are not, in other words, been given a self-standing electron to do with it what we will; rather, we give ourselves one by simply re-creating the situation which was previously explained by an electron and incorporate that situation into our experimental arrangement. As re-creation, the manufacturing process is thus a look-back to a previous explanation.

Thus manufactured, the object of explanation may now be subjected to observation and experiment in order to find out just what and how it is. That requires that we construct an observational context to go along with the manufacturing one we had employed to give ourselves the object we earmarked for observation, a context within which we are to actually perform that observation. Note however that this act of observation is therefore not an ordinary measurement, such as we would undertake to observe the behavior of something which is simply given to us, but rather a measurement which necessarily demands, and actually incorporates, the experimental set-up which has allowed us to give to ourselves the object of explanation whose behavior we intend to quantify. Explaining the outcome of this kind of measurement can therefore no longer be accomplished by testing through experiment the serviceability of various freely conceived explanatory constructs, as would be the case with the outcome of an ordinary measurement performed upon an object of experience, because we must mind the consistency between the object of explanation thus conceived and the object of explanation we had manufactured for observation. Indeed, it would be absurd to deliberately produce an object for observation and then allow the results of observing it to be explained by another, totally different object; the two must be the same.

Here, at long last, we have the key to the ontology of an object of explanation. The fact that the observation of an object of explanation, unlike the observation of an object of experience, involves a measurement which is predicated upon the actual presence of the experiential context which had been previously explained by that object, determines the ontology of that object. We shall call this kind of measurement a predicated rather than an ordinary measurement. Because different from what we ordinarily consider to be a measurement, we must pause awhile and reflect upon how a predicated measurement might fit within the structure of the modern scientific project.