• 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.