'No true empiricist' ... like 'no true Scotsman'?

First, sorry that I hadn't posted in a couple of weeks. But, late last week, I got easy material for two more posts, both long reads, and both about my "favorite" subject of the last year.

That's a shaggy dog, if you will, in that header.

I don't know if Baggini is Scots or not, but David Hume of course was, as well as being an empiricist. Was he a "true" empiricist? Is making claims about "true empiricists" today presentism? And, what other cans of worms have been opened up? 

Let's dive in.

Baggini, in a back and forth on Twitter about whether he cuts David Hume too much slack on his racism (he does, I say), made this claim:

I'd like to see your reasons for disagreeing. (Well, only a bit, because time is short.) He was at root an empiricist, and no empiricist would be racist today.

— Julian Baggini (@JulianBaggini) March 4, 2022

To which I independently Tweeted:

Julian Baggini claims no empiricist would be racist today. Are IQ test results empiricist? Charles Murray notes racial differences in them, says sociological factors don't cause them. So, wrong, Baggini, and no, I'm not directly responding to your Tweets anymore.

— TheRealSocraticGadfly: Friends Crushes Xi Jinping (@real_gadfly) March 4, 2022

What Baggini seems to be claiming is that science, philosophy. or both, are free of bias. Anybody who's read the Great Barrington Declaration knows that's laughable.

Besides, if empiricism is free of bias today, why wasn't it so in Hume's lifetime?

Erm, isn't this presentism? I'll neglect to say anything about petards. https://t.co/cP21ym12pr

— TheRealSocraticGadfly: Friends Crushes Xi Jinping (@real_gadfly) March 4, 2022

Oops! Baggini, as he has with Hume, is trying to use the hand-waving of presentism, and I just hoist him by his own petard.

Yeah.... I quote-tweeted his tweet rather than doing a second independent response in a thread to my first tweet. So sue me.

And, he responded, claiming the petard's on me. 

"Presentism is a historical term meaning judging past actions by today's standards, or uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts." The petard is all yours.

— Julian Baggini (@JulianBaggini) March 5, 2022

So, NOT quote tweeting him, my final take:

"Presentism is a historical term meaning judging past actions by today's standards, or uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes...."
Baggini (NOT quote tweeting) HAS, in claiming no modern empiricist would be racist, staked out uncritical adherence to present attitudes.

— TheRealSocraticGadfly: Friends Crushes Xi Jinping (@real_gadfly) March 5, 2022

I.E., I stand by what I said. M-W's shorter definition confirms me in that.

That said, from what I've read elsewhere, I think that Baggini, like Dan Kaufman, gets Hume's Skeptical history wrong.

Simple and correct answer on this is by straight chronology: Treatise Hume, a Pyrrhonist; post-Treatise Hume an Academic. Per Mossner's bio, as I noted in my review, that's why Hume's bottom line recourse when being called out as a Pyrrhonist was to saiy, "I didn't write the Treatise."

In reality, this, combined with my noting that Hume was a "trimmer" in many ways, which Baggini halfway admits in one piece, though without ever using the word "trimmer," shows that Hume as a philosopher should perhaps be moved into the overrated camp.

It also brings into question Hume's value as arguably the world's first modern psychologist. His "I ca't apprehend myself" sounds so true when one tries to make an instantaneous grasp of who Hume is, as if the mind has a certain quasi-quantum fuzziness that can't be precisely held, or, to riff on both Anaximander and Zeno of Elea, as if it's a river which is always flowing halfway further to its destination while also never the same river.

The reality is that the "self" is a corpus of word, not a moment. To go back to the quantum world analogy, it's the entire diffraction pattern, not one individual wave-particle duad.

Finally, Julian, another petard? If Hume IS a "thorough" racist as you claim (and as I agree, while still noting you undercut yourself), then can you really write a whole book about how Hume can teach us about being human? ONLY if in terms of medieval theology's "via negativa." (And, that wouldn't just be on Hume as a negative mirror on how to not be a racist. It would also be Hume as a negative mirror on how not to be a poseur, a trimmer and other things.)

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More here on Hume's racism, which also notes that Hume believed in polygenesis.