structural:reformatting
Background: Emissionism and selectionism

An emission theory of light was one that regarded the propagation of light as the transport of some kind of matter. While the corpuscular theory was obviously an emission theory, the converse did not follow: in principle, one could be an emissionist without being a corpuscularist. This was convenient because, beyond the ordinary laws of reflection and refraction, emissionists never managed to make testable quantitative predictions from a theory of forces acting on corpuscles of light. But they did make quantitative predictions from the premises that rays were countable objects, which were conserved in their interactions with matter (except absorbent media), and which had particular orientations with respect to their directions of propagation. According to this framework, polarization and the related phenomena of double refraction and partial reflection involved altering the orientations of the rays and/or selecting them according to orientation, and the state of polarization of a beam (a bundle of rays) was a question of how many rays were in what orientations: in a fully polarized beam, the orientations were all the same. This approach, which Jed Buchwald has called selectionism, was pioneered by Malus and diligently pursued by Biot.

Fresnel, in contrast, decided to introduce polarization into interference experiments.