No scientific explanation can dispense with human subjectivity except as a methodological precaution and temporarily. The rainbow cannot be explained solely in terms of physical laws. We need also language to understand it. Why?
Because sound and the rainbow are irreducible qualities, like life and consciousness.
Your mistake is ignoring that the eye and the ear, the senses in general, are not merely tools less powerful than technological means; they are what allow a human world to exist and carry meaning.
No one can reduce the rainbow to optics and neurophysiology; to do so and be satisfied with that is to lose the human dimension of the phenomenon and loose what stay unexplained too .
No one can reduce music to acoustics. And if we do so, like AI, which currently now offers "music" indistinguishable from human music, we lose our humanity.
So the essential point that seems to elude you, and which you call a useless semantic quarrel, is the very status of science itself.
Is the primary and ultimate goal of science to deliver Nature to us bound hand and foot like an object, or is its primary and ultimate goal a necessary transformation of consciousness and thought?
Guess Goethe’s answer and compare it to that of our current techno-cultists.
So we’re now discussing semantics.
The physical phenomenon called "rainbow" can be measured and rigorously characterized and modeled. It is the result of multiple reflections and refractions in raindrops. Period.
The English word "rainbow" is a description of an observation done by the human eye, not instruments. This occurs because the mind interprets the physical phenomenon "rainbow" from the information it gets from the eyes.
These are two separate and different explanations, each valid in its own context.
