Dry Honers and Wet Honers
The guy who holds the Guinness World Record for Fastest Shave with a Double Bit Axe knows a fair bit about what it takes to make an edge sharp. He is a big advocate of dry honing. I have dry honed with Arkansas stones and it works pretty well. I've studied the photos Tim Zowada took of the dry vs. wet honed coticules. Clearly the dry honed razor is shinier and has fewer scratches than the wet honed razor. People who have tried both methods with the coticules have reported fast removal of steel with the dry method but better shaves with the wet method.
The Belgians say that it's the slurry which does the honing. They advocate a milk-consistency slurry. Certainly you can abrade the steel against the dry stone and get a good polish. Look at the consistency of the particles and the size of the particles of the coticule vs. the other stones. The coticule is very consistent in particle size and height off of the stone body. Dry honing works. BUT, is that the whole story?
Apparently the polished edge from the dry honing doesn't cut whiskers as well as the wet honed edge. Why? I think it's because of the scratches in the steel making teeth on the edge of the blade which grab the whiskers and then slice them off. Polished edges just don't have the tooth. I say "teeth" but they're not really very coarse and in fact are very fine. "Polish" is also a very relative term. The strop aligns those teeth and I think that's why I've come to use natural leather. Barbers have recommended that to me and I've tried it and it works.