ABSTRACT
Christoph Schmidt-Petri’s defense of J. S. Mill’s empiricism in the face of his talk of tendency laws blends historical and philosophical analysis neatly into one, and I find it convincing when he says that I am quite possibly wrong to suppose Mill at one with me in endorsing tendencies. Rather, SchmidtPetri argues that, for Mill, to talk about tendency laws is not to endorse the existence of tendencies but rather to point to the fact that regularities exhibit a certain pattern: What regularly follows when a number of factors co-occur is the “sum”, in some sense, of what would happen were they to occur consecutively.
