An astronomer named william herschel was one of the first people to try and map the structure of our galaxy in 1785 (believed to be the entire universe at that time). he did this by assuming that all stars had the same absolute magnitude and then counted how many stars he could see in each direction on the sky. he put this together to draw*a map of our galaxy suppose that you are a modern william herschel and you are looking at a visual ccd image. this ccd image has a field of view of 10 arcminutes by 10 arcminutes. now a few assumptions: o all stars have the same absolute magnitude as the sun (4.8) the density of stars is uniform (assume one star per 25 pe3) assume that this ccd image has an exposure time that allows you to see stars with apparent magnitudes of 20 and brighter (a) how far away is the most distant star you see? b) how many stars with magnitude between 19 and 20 do you expect to see in your image? c) how many stars with magnitude between 13 and 14 do you expect to see in your image? (d) make a plot of the luminosity function φ(m) vs m, so that φ(m) shows the number of stars in the frame with magnitude between m an

33: i think it’s b

relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them. more precisely, “relativism” covers views which maintain that—at a high level of abstraction—at least some class of things have the properties they have (e.g., beautiful, morally good, epistemically justified) not simpliciter, but only relative to a given framework of assessment (e.g., local cultural norms, individual standards), and correspondingly, that the truth of claims attributing these properties holds only once the relevant framework of assessment is specified or supplied. relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established.

relativism has been, in its various guises, both one of the most popular and most reviled philosophical doctrines of our time. defenders see it as a harbinger of tolerance and the only ethical and epistemic stance worthy of the open-minded and tolerant. detractors dismiss it for its alleged incoherence and uncritical intellectual permissiveness. debates about relativism permeate the whole spectrum of philosophical sub-disciplines. from ethics to epistemology, science to religion, political theory to ontology, theories of meaning and even logic, philosophy has felt the need to respond to this heady and seemingly subversive idea. discussions of relativism often also invoke considerations relevant to the very nature and methodology of philosophy and to the division between the so-called “analytic and continental” camps in philosophy. and yet, despite a long history of debate going back to plato and an increasingly large body of writing, it is still difficult to come to an agreed definition of what, at its core, relativism is, and what philosophical import it has. this entry attempts to provide a broad account of the many ways in which “relativism” has been defined, explained, defended and criticized.

explanation:

b.

explanation: