We’re going to be starting up the reading group again for this school year. The next Philosophy of Biology reading group meeting will be in one week. That is next Tuesday, September 13th at 7:30 p.m. in the philosophy department lounge located in the second floor of the West Duke building. The reading will be an article by Chris Elliot: “Competition Theory and Channeling Explanation” published in the most recent edition of the online journal Philosophy & Theory in Biology. Alex Rosenberg will provide drinks.
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A summary of the discussion we had in the reading group follows:
• We discussed how the Competitive Exclusion Principle (CEP) could both be not a law of nature and still be explanatory, which was the intuition and argument central to the first half of the article. It seemed at first blush to be fairly reasonable claims.
• It became apparent that many reasonable formulations of the CEP could not be operationalized and the ones that could were subject to very straightforward exceptions. This cast a doubt on whether CEP was falsifiable. A person advocating CEP could simply reply to every exception by denying that the two species in question competed for the same resources or were involved in the same niche.
• We discussed Eliot’s notion of channeling explanations – first rejecting an uncharitable understanding that renders them vacuously true (that possibility always follows from actuality and so there MUST be an explanation).
• We concluded that Eliot meant channeling explanations to be atemporal, but that they could easily be redefined to involve temporal information. In fact, for something to be completely channel explained (as opposed to mostly or somewhat), it seems we would need historical information.
• We discussed whether probabilities could be assigned to the range of possibilities allowed in channeling explanations and whether this would be defeated if we didn’t list all conceivable ceteris paribus conditions.