4.9.1 Reference To Explanation

As a mente concipio, an object of explanation is expressly intentional; it is something which we give to ourselves for a specific purpose, that of explaining. To divorce an object of explanation from its explanatory function would be to incorrectly endow it with the ontology of an object of experience which is simply there to be encountered as something possessed of definite physical properties. Einstein once made the point that the location of a photon cannot be doubted because it carried energy which, once emitted from its source, leads an independent existence and must therefore be located somewhere. While such a statement would be patently true if the photon were an object of experience, it cannot be true for a photon which is an object of explanation. Indeed, because the photon was conceived for the purpose of explaining some optical experience, the question concerning its location could not even be meaningfully posed until the optical experience to be explained has been completed by a detection. In fact, one might say that the photon had not even been ‘created’ at the source until its destination has been specified by the experiential context whose explanation required it. Interestingly, an explanatory conception which similarly questions the independent existence of a photon, and thus indirectly recognizes the referential character of an object of explanation, was put forth by G.N. Lewis in 1926 and was subsequently expanded upon by Wheeler and Feynman in their 1949 absorber theory paper:

I am going to make the assumption that an atom never emits light except to another atom and to claim that it is as absurd to think of light emitted by one atom regardless of the existence of a receiving atom as it would be to think of an atom absorbing light without the existence of light to be absorbed. I propose to eliminate the idea of mere emission of light and substitute the idea of transmission, or a process of exchange of energy between two definite atoms or molecules.