Edmund Lee Gettier III ( / ˈ ɡ ɛ t i ər / ; October 31, 1927 – March 23, 2021) was an American philosopher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst . He is best known for his article written in 1963: "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", which has generated an extensive philosophical literature trying to respond to what became known as the Gettier problem .
115-745: Edmund Lee Gettier III was born on October 31, 1927, in Baltimore, Maryland . Gettier obtained his B.A. from Johns Hopkins University in 1949. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Cornell University in 1961 with a dissertation on “ Bertrand Russell ’s Theories of Belief” written under the supervision of Norman Malcolm . Gettier taught philosophy at Wayne State University from 1957 until 1967 initially as an Instructor, then as an assistant professor, and, latterly, as an associate professor. His philosophical colleagues at Wayne State included, among others, Alvin Plantinga and Héctor-Neri Castaneda . In
230-427: A "universe", or vast field in which we of today and our own civilization occupy only one place of many. The result was a widening of a fundamental point of view, a departure from unconscious ethnocentricity toward relativity. This shift from naive self-centeredness in one's own time and spot to a broader view based on objective comparison is somewhat like the change from the original geocentric assumption of astronomy to
345-524: A Town on the North side of the Patapsco River." Surveyors began laying out the town on January 12, 1730. By 1752 the town had just 27 homes, including a church and two taverns. Jonestown and Fells Point had been settled to the east. The three settlements, covering 60 acres (24 ha), became a commercial hub, and in 1768 were designated as the county seat. The first printing press was introduced to
460-612: A clash between local youth and police that resulted in a state of emergency declaration and a curfew. Baltimore has seen the reopening of the Hippodrome Theatre in 2004, the opening of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture in 2005, and the establishment of the National Slavic Museum in 2012. On April 12, 2012, Johns Hopkins held a dedication ceremony to mark
575-533: A culture that is profoundly different from our own, that we can realize the extent to which our own beliefs and activities are culture-bound, rather than natural or universal. In this context, cultural relativism is a heuristic device of fundamental importance because it calls attention to the importance of variation in any sample that is used to derive generalizations about humanity. Marcus and Fischer's attention to anthropology's refusal to accept Western culture's claims to universality implies that cultural relativism
690-619: A decline in major manufacturing, heavy industry , and restructuring of the rail industry , Baltimore has shifted to a service-oriented economy . Johns Hopkins Hospital and University are the top employers. Baltimore is home to the Baltimore Orioles of Major League Baseball , and the Baltimore Ravens of the National Football League . Many Baltimore neighborhoods have rich histories. The city
805-604: A draft "Statement on Human Rights" which Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association revised, submitted to the Commission on Human Rights, and then published. The statement begins with a fairly straightforward explanation of the relevance of cultural relativism: The problem is thus to formulate a statement of human rights that will do more than phrase respect for the individual as individual. It must also take into full account
920-405: A healthy scepticism as to the eternity of any value prized by a particular people, anthropology does not as a matter of theory deny the existence of moral absolutes. Rather, the use of the comparative method provides a scientific means of discovering such absolutes. If all surviving societies have found it necessary to impose some of the same restrictions upon the behavior of their members, this makes
1035-627: A minority. The Baltimore Council passed the ordinance, and it became law on December 20, 1910, with Democratic Mayor J. Barry Mahool 's signature. The Baltimore segregation ordinance was the first of its kind in the United States. Many other southern cities followed with their own segregation ordinances, though the US Supreme Court ruled against them in Buchanan v. Warley (1917). The city grew in area by annexing new suburbs from
1150-434: A much broader notion of culture, defined as: [T]he totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the behavior of the individuals composing a social group collectively and individually in relation to their natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group itself, and of each individual to himself. This view of culture confronts anthropologists with two problems: first, how to escape
1265-606: A number of anthropologists. Julian Steward (who, as a student of Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie , and as a professor at Columbia University , was situated firmly in the Boasian lineage) suggested that the first claim "may have been a loophole to exclude Germany from the advocated tolerance", but that it revealed the fundamental flaw in moral relativism: "Either we tolerate everything, and keep hands off, or we fight intolerance and conquest—political and economic as well as military—in all their forms." Similarly, he questioned whether
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#17327652111501380-579: A part in the American Revolution . City leaders such as Jonathan Plowman Jr. led many residents to resist British taxes , and merchants signed agreements refusing to trade with Britain. The Second Continental Congress met in the Henry Fite House from December 1776 to February 1777, effectively making the city the capital of the United States during this period. Baltimore, Jonestown , and Fells Point were incorporated as
1495-757: A period of dormancy in Baltimore City archaeological findings which had persisted since the 1980s. During the Late Woodland period, the archaeological culture known as the Potomac Creek complex resided in the area from Baltimore south to the Rappahannock River in present-day Virginia . The city is named after Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore , an English peer, member of the Irish House of Lords and founding proprietor of
1610-499: A single sound , but also having contrasts that did not exist in English. He then argued the case that Native Americans had been pronouncing the word in question the same way, consistently, and the variation was only perceived by someone whose own language distinguishes those two sounds. Boas's student, the linguist Edward Sapir , later noted also that English speakers pronounce sounds differently even when they think they are pronouncing
1725-409: A single phoneme. Boas's students did not draw only on his engagement with German philosophy. They also engaged the work of contemporary philosophers and scientists, such as Karl Pearson , Ernst Mach , Henri Poincaré , William James , and John Dewey in an attempt to move, in the words of Boas's student Robert Lowie , from "a naively metaphysical to an epistemological stage" as a basis for revising
1840-413: A strong argument that these aspects of the moral code are indispensable. Although Kluckhohn was using language that was popular at the time (e.g. "savage tribe") but which is now considered antiquated and coarse by most anthropologists, his point was that although moral standards are rooted in one's culture, anthropological research reveals that the fact that people have moral standards is a universal. He
1955-474: A unique skyline peppered with churches and monuments developed. Baltimore acquired its moniker "The Monumental City" after an 1827 visit to Baltimore by President John Quincy Adams . At an evening function, Adams gave the following toast: "Baltimore: the Monumental City—May the days of her safety be as prosperous and happy, as the days of her dangers have been trying and triumphant." Baltimore pioneered
2070-483: Is Baltimore's nonprofit historic and architectural preservation organization, which works to preserve and promote Baltimore's historic buildings and neighborhoods. Baltimore is officially divided into nine geographical regions: North, Northeast, East, Southeast, South, Southwest, West, Northwest, and Central, with each district patrolled by a respective Baltimore Police Department . Interstate 83 and Charles Street down to Hanover Street and Ritchie Highway serve as
2185-602: Is a neoclassical design by Benjamin Latrobe, and one of the oldest Catholic cathedrals in the United States. In 1813, Robert Cary Long Sr. built for Rembrandt Peale the first substantial structure in the United States designed expressly as a museum. Restored, it is now the Municipal Museum of Baltimore, or popularly the Peale Museum . The McKim Free School was founded and endowed by John McKim. The building
2300-560: Is a tool not only in cultural understanding, but in cultural critique. This points to the second front on which they believe anthropology offers people enlightenment: The other promise of anthropology, one less fully distinguished and attended to than the first, has been to serve as a form of cultural critique for ourselves. In using portraits of other cultural patterns to reflect self-critically on our own ways, anthropology disrupts common sense and makes us reexamine our taken-for-granted assumptions. The critical function of cultural relativism
2415-400: Is bordered by Anne Arundel County to the south. Baltimore exhibits examples from each period of architecture over more than two centuries, and work from architects such as Benjamin Latrobe , George A. Frederick , John Russell Pope , Mies van der Rohe , and I. M. Pei . Baltimore is rich in architecturally significant buildings in a variety of styles. The Baltimore Basilica (1806–1821)
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#17327652111502530-558: Is home to some of the earliest National Register Historic Districts in the nation, including Fell's Point , Federal Hill , and Mount Vernon . Baltimore has more public statues and monuments per capita than any other city in the country. Nearly one third of the buildings (over 65,000) are designated as historic in the National Register , more than any other US city. Baltimore has 66 National Register Historic Districts and 33 local historic districts. The historical records of
2645-456: Is interesting, according to philosopher Duncan Pritchard , is that Gettier wrote his paper in a bid to get tenure and that he had little interest in epistemology as he never published anything else in the field, and declined to attend a 2013 conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of his article's publication at the University of Edinburgh. Baltimore, Maryland Baltimore
2760-477: Is most obvious in the case of language. Although language is commonly thought of as a means of communication, Boas called attention especially to the idea that it is also a means of categorizing experiences, hypothesizing that the existence of different languages suggests that people categorize, and thus experience, language differently (this view was more fully developed in the hypothesis of Linguistic relativity ). Thus, although all people perceive visible radiation
2875-450: Is my opinion that the main object of ethnological collections should be the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes. Boas's student Alfred Kroeber described the rise of the relativist perspective thus: Now while some of the interest in (so called solial culture science) anthropology in its earlier stages
2990-452: Is not explanation. Boas argued that although similar causes produce similar effects, different causes may also produce similar effects. Consequently, similar artifacts found in distinct and distant places may be the products of distinct causes. Against the popular method of drawing analogies in order to reach generalizations, Boas argued in favor of an inductive method. Based on his critique of contemporary museum displays, Boas concluded: It
3105-443: Is one of few remaining structures of its kind. It was constructed without the use of exterior scaffolding. The Sun Iron Building, designed by R.C. Hatfield in 1851, was the city's first iron-front building and was a model for a whole generation of downtown buildings. Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church , built in 1870 in memory of financier George Brown , has stained glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany and has been called "one of
3220-545: Is only since the development of the evolutional theory that it became clear that the object of study is the individual, not abstractions from the individual under observation. We have to study each ethnological specimen individually in its history and in its medium.... By regarding a single implement outside of its surroundings, outside of other inventions of the people to whom it belongs, and outside of other phenomena affecting that people and its productions, we cannot understand its meanings.... Our objection...is, that classification
3335-483: Is so vast and pervasive that there cannot be a relationship between culture and race . Cultural relativism involves specific epistemological and methodological claims. Whether or not these claims necessitate a specific ethical stance is a matter of debate. Cultural relativism became popularized after World War II in reaction to historical events such as "Nazism, and to colonialism, ethnocentrism and racism more generally." Herodotus ( Histories 3.38) observes on
3450-485: Is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland . With a population of 585,708 at the 2020 census , it is the 30th-most populous US city . Baltimore was designated as an independent city by the Constitution of Maryland in 1851, and is the most populous independent city in the nation. As of 2020 , the population of the Baltimore metropolitan area was 2,838,327, the 20th-largest metropolitan area in
3565-444: Is the tallest equilateral pentagonal building in the world at 405 feet (123 m) tall. The Harbor East area has seen the addition of two new towers which have completed construction: a 24-floor tower that is the new world headquarters of Legg Mason , and a 21-floor Four Seasons Hotel complex. The streets of Baltimore are organized in a grid and spoke pattern, lined with tens of thousands of rowhouses . The mix of materials on
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3680-471: Is widely understood; philosopher John Cook observed that "It is aimed at getting people to admit that although it may seem to them that their moral principles are self-evidently true, and hence seem to be grounds for passing judgement on other peoples , in fact, the self-evidence of these principles is a kind of illusion." Cook recognizes the middle ground in between moral relativism and moral absolutism that cultural relativism straddles, remarking that
3795-754: The Baltimore Convention Center (1979). Harborplace , an urban retail and restaurant complex, opened on the waterfront in 1980, followed by the National Aquarium , Maryland's largest tourist destination, and the Baltimore Museum of Industry in 1981. In 1995, the city opened the American Visionary Art Museum on Federal Hill. During the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in the United States , Baltimore City Health Department official Robert Mehl persuaded
3910-465: The Baltimore Ravens football team moved into M&T Bank Stadium next to Camden Yards. Baltimore has had a high homicide rate for several decades, peaking in 1993, and again in 2015. These deaths have taken an especially severe toll within the black community. Following the death of Freddie Gray in April 2015, the city experienced major protests and international media attention, as well as
4025-482: The Midwest . By 1820 its population had reached 60,000, and its economy had shifted from its base in tobacco plantations to sawmilling , shipbuilding , and textile production. These industries benefited from war but successfully shifted into infrastructure development during peacetime. Baltimore had one of the worst riots of the antebellum South in 1835, when bad investments led to the Baltimore bank riot . It
4140-455: The National Aquarium , Maryland Science Center , Pier Six Pavilion , and Power Plant Live . Cultural relativism Cultural relativism is the view that moral values must be understood in their own cultural context and not judged according to the standards of a different culture. It asserts the equal validity of all points of view and the relative nature of truth, which is determined by an individual or their culture. The concept
4255-772: The National Guard , leaving 10 dead and 25 wounded. The beginnings of settlement movement work in Baltimore were made early in 1893, when Rev. Edward A. Lawrence took up lodgings with his friend Frank Thompson, in one of the Winans tenements, the Lawrence House being established shortly thereafter at 814-816 West Lombard Street. On February 7, 1904, the Great Baltimore Fire destroyed over 1,500 buildings in 30 hours, leaving more than 70 blocks of
4370-608: The Province of Maryland . The Calverts took the title Barons Baltimore from Baltimore Manor , an English Plantation estate they were granted in County Longford , Ireland . Baltimore is an anglicization of the Irish name Baile an Tí Mhóir , meaning "town of the big house". In the early 1600s, the immediate Baltimore vicinity was sparsely populated, if at all, by Native Americans. The Baltimore County area northward
4485-720: The Union during the American Civil War , following the 55–12 vote by the Maryland General Assembly against secession. Later, the Union's strategic occupation of the city in 1861 ensured Maryland would not further consider secession. The Union's capital of Washington, D.C. was well-situated to impede Baltimore and Maryland's communication or commerce with the Confederacy . Baltimore experienced some of
4600-689: The United Arab Emirates , and Michael Bloomberg . In September 2016, the Baltimore City Council approved a $ 660 million bond deal for the $ 5.5 billion Port Covington redevelopment project championed by Under Armour founder Kevin Plank and his real estate company Sagamore Development. Port Covington surpassed the Harbor Point development as the largest tax-increment financing deal in Baltimore's history and among
4715-486: The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Public order was not restored until April 12, 1968. The Baltimore uprising cost the city an estimated $ 10 million (US$ 88 million in 2024). A total of 12,000 Maryland National Guard and federal troops were ordered into the city. The city experienced challenges again in 1974 when teachers, municipal workers , and police officers conducted strikes. By
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4830-402: The deep South and by white suburbanization , the relative size of the city's black population grew from 23.8% in 1950 to 46.4% in 1970. Encouraged by real estate blockbusting techniques, recently settled white areas rapidly became all-black neighborhoods, in a rapid process which was nearly total by 1970. The Baltimore riot of 1968 , coinciding with uprisings in other cities , followed
4945-540: The Baltimore area and inhabited primarily the north bank of the Potomac River in what are now Charles and southern Prince George's counties in the coastal areas south of the Fall Line . European colonization of Maryland began in earnest with the arrival of the merchant ship The Ark carrying 140 colonists at St. Clement's Island in the Potomac River on March 25, 1634. Europeans then began to settle
5060-637: The City of Baltimore in 1796–1797. The city remained a part of surrounding Baltimore County and continued to serve as its county seat from 1768 to 1851, after which it became an independent city . The Battle of Baltimore against the British in 1814 inspired the U.S. national anthem, " The Star-Spangled Banner ", and the construction of the Battle Monument , which became the city's official emblem. A distinctive local culture started to take shape, and
5175-508: The Copernican interpretation of the solar system and the subsequent still greater widening to a universe of galaxies. This conception of culture, and principle of cultural relativism, were for Kroeber and his colleagues the fundamental contribution of anthropology, and what distinguished anthropology from similar disciplines such as sociology and psychology . Ruth Benedict , another of Boas's students, also argued that an appreciation of
5290-724: The Europeans. In 1661 David Jones claimed the area known today as Jonestown on the east bank of the Jones Falls stream. The colonial General Assembly of Maryland created the Port of Baltimore at old Whetstone Point, now Locust Point , in 1706 for the tobacco trade . The Town of Baltimore, on the west side of the Jones Falls, was founded on August 8, 1729, when the Governor of Maryland signed an act allowing "the building of
5405-655: The National Aquarium, Camden Yards have helped revive the Inner Harbor area from what once was an exclusively industrial district full of dilapidated warehouses into a bustling commercial district full of bars, restaurants, and retail establishments. After an international competition, the University of Baltimore School of Law awarded the German firm Behnisch Architekten 1st prize for its design, which
5520-546: The United States today. Lexington Market was also a center of slave trading. Enslaved Black people were sold at numerous sites through the downtown area, with sales advertised in The Baltimore Sun . Both tobacco and sugar cane were labor-intensive crops. In 1774, Baltimore established the first post office system in what became the United States, and the first water company chartered in the newly independent nation, Baltimore Water Company, 1792. Baltimore played
5635-411: The academic year of 1964–65, he held a postdoctoral Mellon Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh . His recorded field of research was "Bertrand Russell's theories of belief, and their effect on contemporary thought." While at Pittsburgh, he met a young Bas C. Van Fraasen and published his first and only book review of John Passmore's Philosophical Reasoning . In 1967, Gettier was recruited to
5750-576: The area further north, in what is now Baltimore County . Since Maryland was a colony, Baltimore's streets were named to show loyalty to the mother country, e.g. King, Queen, King George and Caroline streets. The original county seat , known today as Old Baltimore, was located on Bush River within the present-day Aberdeen Proving Ground . The colonists engaged in sporadic warfare with the Susquehannock, whose numbers dwindled primarily from new infectious diseases, such as smallpox , endemic among
5865-482: The aspirations of any single people. Such a document will lead to frustration, not realization of the personalities of vast numbers of human beings. Although this statement could be read as making a procedural point (that the Commission must involve people of diverse cultures, especially cultures that had been or are still under European colonial or imperial domination ), the document ended by making two substantive claims: These claims provoked an immediate response by
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#17327652111505980-588: The beginning of the 1970s, Baltimore's downtown area, known as the Inner Harbor, had been neglected and was occupied by a collection of abandoned warehouses. The nickname "Charm City" came from a 1975 meeting of advertisers seeking to improve the city's reputation. Efforts to redevelop the area started with the construction of the Maryland Science Center , which opened in 1976, the Baltimore World Trade Center (1977), and
6095-533: The beliefs were true for reasons unrelated to the justification. Some philosophers, however, thought the definition of knowledge as justified true belief had already been questioned in a general way by the work of Wittgenstein. (Later, a similar argument was found in the papers of Bertrand Russell .) Gettier provides several examples of beliefs that are both true and justified, but that we should not intuitively term knowledge. Cases of this sort are now termed "Gettier (counter-)examples". Because Gettier's criticism of
6210-707: The best; and that being so, it is unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things. There is abundant evidence that this is the universal feeling about the ancient customs of one's country. He mentions an anecdote of Darius the Great who illustrated the principle by inquiring about the funeral customs of the Greeks and the Callatiae , peoples from the extreme western and eastern fringes of his empire, respectively. They practiced cremation and funerary cannibalism , respectively, and were each dismayed and abhorred at
6325-502: The causes of human action, they grouped similar artifacts together—regardless of provenance. Their aim was to classify artifacts, like biological organisms, according to families, genera, and species. Thus organized museum displays would illustrate the evolution of civilization from its crudest to its most refined forms. In an article in the journal Science , Boas argued that this approach to cultural evolution ignored one of Charles Darwin 's main contributions to evolutionary theory: It
6440-457: The city in 1765 by Nicholas Hasselbach , whose equipment was later used in the printing of Baltimore's first newspapers, The Maryland Journal and The Baltimore Advertiser , first published by William Goddard in 1773. Baltimore grew swiftly in the 18th century, its plantations producing grain and tobacco for sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean . The profit from sugar encouraged
6555-556: The city's 1.6-mile-long (2.6 km) Francis Scott Key Bridge , which constituted a southeast portion of the Baltimore Beltway , was struck by a container ship and completely collapsed . A major rescue operation was launched with US authorities attempting to rescue people in the water. Eight construction workers, who were working on the bridge at the time, fell into the Patapsco River . Two people were rescued from
6670-488: The city's mayor to form a committee to address food problems. The Baltimore-based charity Moveable Feast grew out of this initiative in 1990. In 1992, the Baltimore Orioles baseball team moved from Memorial Stadium to Oriole Park at Camden Yards , located downtown near the harbor. Pope John Paul II held an open-air mass at Camden Yards during his papal visit to the United States in October 1995. Three years later
6785-632: The completion of one of the United States' largest medical complexes – the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore – which features the Sheikh Zayed Cardiovascular and Critical Care Tower and The Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children's Center. The event, held at the entrance to the $ 1.1 billion 1.6 million-square-foot-facility, honored the many donors including Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan , first president of
6900-538: The country. When combined the Washington–Baltimore combined statistical area (CSA) had a 2020 population of 9,973,383, the third-largest in the country. Though the city is not located within or under the administrative jurisdiction of any county in the state, it is part of the Central Maryland region, together with the surrounding county that shares its name . The land that is present-day Baltimore
7015-414: The cultivation of cane in the Caribbean and the importation of food by planters there. Since Baltimore was the county seat, a courthouse was built in 1768 to serve both the city and county. Its square was a center of community meetings and discussions. Baltimore established its public market system in 1763. Lexington Market , founded in 1782, is one of the oldest continuously operating public markets in
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#17327652111507130-466: The definition of knowledge as " justified true belief " that dates back to Plato 's Theaetetus but is discounted at the end of that very dialogue. This account was accepted by most philosophers at the time, most prominently the epistemologist Clarence Irving Lewis and his student Roderick Chisholm . Gettier's article offered counterexamples to this account in the form of cases in which subjects had true beliefs that were also justified but for which
7245-628: The downtown area burned to the ground. Damages were estimated at $ 150 million in 1904 dollars. As the city rebuilt during the next two years, lessons learned from the fire led to improvements in firefighting equipment standards. Baltimore lawyer Milton Dashiell advocated for an ordinance to bar African-Americans from moving into the Eutaw Place neighborhood in northwest Baltimore. He proposed to recognize majority white residential blocks and majority black residential blocks and to prevent people from moving into housing on such blocks where they would be
7360-548: The downtown population grew 130 percent as old commercial properties have been replaced by residential property. Still the city's main commercial area and business district, it includes Baltimore's sports complexes: Oriole Park at Camden Yards , M&T Bank Stadium , and the Royal Farms Arena ; and the shops and attractions in the Inner Harbor: Harborplace , the Baltimore Convention Center ,
7475-460: The earliest violence associated with the American Civil War . The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad , the nation's oldest, was built in 1830 and cemented Baltimore's status as a transportation hub, giving producers in the Midwest and Appalachia access to the city's port . Baltimore's Inner Harbor was the second leading port of entry for immigrants to the US and a major manufacturing center. After
7590-518: The east–west dividing line and Eastern Avenue to Route 40 as the north–south dividing line; however, Baltimore Street is north–south dividing line for the U.S. Postal Service . Central Baltimore, originally called the Middle District, stretches north of the Inner Harbor up to the edge of Druid Hill Park . Downtown Baltimore has mainly served as a commercial district with limited residential opportunities; however, between 2000 and 2010,
7705-520: The ensuing battlegrounds that arise tend to be in the domain of claims of self-evidence made on behalf of a people. The critical function was indeed one of the ends to which Benedict hoped her own work would meet. The most famous use of cultural relativism as a means of cultural critique is Margaret Mead 's research of adolescent female sexuality in Samoa . By contrasting the ease and freedom enjoyed by Samoan teenagers, Mead called into question claims that
7820-407: The face of these rowhouses also give Baltimore its distinct look. The rowhouses are a mix of brick and formstone facings, the latter a technology patented in 1937 by Albert Knight. John Waters characterized formstone as "the polyester of brick" in a 30-minute documentary film, Little Castles: A Formstone Phenomenon . In The Baltimore Rowhouse , Mary Ellen Hayward and Charles Belfoure considered
7935-462: The faculty of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, being promoted to full professor there in 1972. He taught there until his retirement, as Professor Emeritus, in 2001. Gettier died on March 23, 2021, aged 93. Gettier's fame rests on a three-page article, published in Analysis in 1963, that remains one of the most famous in recent philosophical history. In it, Gettier challenges
8050-608: The first casualties of Civil War on April 19, 1861, when Union Army soldiers en route from President Street Station to Camden Yards clashed with a secessionist mob in the Pratt Street riot . In the midst of the Long Depression that followed the Panic of 1873 , the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad company attempted to lower its workers' wages, leading to strikes and riots in the city and beyond . Strikers clashed with
8165-787: The government of Baltimore are located at the Baltimore City Archives . The Baltimore area had been inhabited by Native Americans since at least the 10th millennium BC , when Paleo-Indians first settled in the region. One Paleo-Indian site and several Archaic period and Woodland period archaeological sites have been identified in Baltimore, including four from the Late Woodland period . In December 2021, several Woodland period Native American artifacts were found in Herring Run Park in northeast Baltimore, dating 5,000 to 9,000 years ago. The finding followed
8280-400: The harbor to 480 feet (150 m) in the northwest corner near Pimlico . In the 2010 census, Baltimore has a total area of 92.1 square miles (239 km ), of which 80.9 sq mi (210 km ) is land and 11.1 sq mi (29 km ) is water. The total area is 12.1 percent water. Baltimore is almost surrounded by Baltimore County, but is politically independent of it. It
8395-469: The importance of culture and the problem of ethnocentrism demands that the scientist adopt cultural relativism as a method. Her book, Patterns of Culture , did much to popularize the term in the United States. In it, she explained that: The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another items in
8510-466: The individual as a member of a social group of which he is part, whose sanctioned modes of life shape his behavior, and with whose fate his own is thus inextricably bound. The bulk of this statement emphasizes concern that the Declaration of Human Rights was being prepared primarily by people from Western societies, and would express values that, far from being universal, are really Western: Today
8625-405: The justified true belief model is systemic, some of his examples, that demonstrate the philosophical issues, lack practical plausibility; for example, one scenario hypothesizes that one job-seeking candidate is somehow aware of exactly how many coins are in the other candidate's pocket. Accordingly, other authors have imagined more realistic and plausible counterexamples. For example: I am watching
8740-399: The largest urban redevelopment projects in the country. The waterfront development that includes the new headquarters for Under Armour, as well as shops, housing, offices, and manufacturing spaces is projected to create 26,500 permanent jobs with a $ 4.3 billion annual economic impact. Goldman Sachs invested $ 233 million into the redevelopment project. In the early hours of March 26, 2024,
8855-424: The local language and be enculturated, at least partially, into that culture. In this context, cultural relativism is an attitude that is of fundamental methodological importance, because it calls attention to the importance of the local context in understanding the meaning of particular human beliefs and activities. Thus, in 1948 Virginia Heyer wrote: "Cultural relativity, to phrase it in starkest abstraction, states
8970-533: The men's Wimbledon Final, and John McEnroe is playing Jimmy Connors, it is match point, and McEnroe wins. I say to myself: "John McEnroe is this year's men's champion at Wimbledon". Unbeknownst to me, however, the BBC were experiencing a broadcasting fault and so had broadcast a tape of last year's final, when McEnroe also beat Connors. I had been watching last year's Wimbledon final, so I believed that McEnroe had bested Connors. But at that same time, in real life, McEnroe
9085-407: The methods and theories of anthropology. Boas and his students realized that, if they were to conduct scientific research in other cultures, they would need to employ methods that would help them escape the limits of their own ethnocentrism. One such method is that of ethnography : basically, they advocated living with people of another culture for an extended period of time, so that they could learn
9200-435: The most beautiful, values the most virtuous, and beliefs the most truthful. Franz Boas , originally trained in physics and geography , and heavily influenced by the thought of Kant , Herder , and von Humboldt , argued that one's culture may mediate and thus limit one's perceptions in less obvious ways. Boas understood "culture" to include not only certain tastes in food, art, and music, or beliefs about religion; he assumed
9315-430: The most significant buildings in this city, a treasure of art and architecture" by Baltimore magazine. The 1845 Greek Revival -style Lloyd Street Synagogue is one of the oldest synagogues in the United States . The Johns Hopkins Hospital , designed by Lt. Col. John S. Billings in 1876, was a considerable achievement for its day in functional arrangement and fireproofing. I.M. Pei's World Trade Center (1977)
9430-582: The nation's capital , before it returned to Philadelphia in March 1777. The Battle of Baltimore was pivotal during the War of 1812 , culminating in the failed British bombardment of Fort McHenry , during which Francis Scott Key wrote a poem that would become " The Star-Spangled Banner ", designated as the national anthem in 1931. During the Pratt Street Riot of 1861 , the city was the site of some of
9545-451: The possibility that cultural values and norms will necessarily change as influencing norms and conditions change in the future. Horizontal relativism describes that cultures in the present ( horizontal in time—i.e., the present period of the culture) are products of the prevailing norms and conditions developed as a result of their unique geographies, histories, and environmental influences. Therefore, moral or ethical judgments, made during
9660-640: The present, regarding a current culture's belief system or societal practices must account for these unique differences to be intellectually useful. The transformation of cultural relativism as a heuristic tool into the doctrine of moral relativism occurred in the context of the work of the Commission of Human Rights of the United Nations in preparing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Melville J. Herskovits prepared
9775-468: The principle of cultural relativism thus: "Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation." Boas pointed out that scientists grow up and work in a particular culture, and are thus necessarily ethnocentric. He provided an example of this in his 1889 article "On Alternating Sounds". A number of linguists at Boas's time had observed that speakers of some Native-American languages pronounced
9890-541: The principle of cultural relativism was popularized after World War II , it came to be understood "more as a doctrine, or position, The principle of cultural relativity does not mean that because the members of some savage tribe are allowed to behave in a certain way that this fact gives intellectual warrant for such behavior in all groups. Cultural relativity means, on the contrary, that the appropriateness of any positive or negative custom must be evaluated with regard to how this habit fits with other group habits. While breeding
10005-673: The problem is complicated by the fact that the Declaration must be of world-wide applicability. It must embrace and recognize the validity of many different ways of life. It will not be convincing to the Indonesian, the African, the Chinese, if it lies on the same plane as like documents of an earlier period. The rights of Man in the Twentieth Century cannot be circumscribed by the standards of any single culture, or be dictated by
10120-546: The proposition of the other tribes' practices. The works of the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus detail ancient Greek arguments for cultural relativism as part of the tenth of the Ten Modes of Aenesidemus . According to George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer : 20th century social and cultural anthropology has promised its still largely Western readership enlightenment on two fronts. The one has been
10235-412: The relativity of mores ( νόμοι ): If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be
10350-530: The relativity of the part to the whole. The part gains its cultural significance by its place in the whole, and cannot retain its integrity in a different situation." Another method was ethnology : to compare and contrast as wide a range of cultures as possible, in a systematic and even-handed manner. In the late nineteenth century, this study occurred primarily through the display of material artifacts in museums. Curators typically assumed that similar causes produce similar effects; therefore, in order to understand
10465-558: The right kind of justification. Gettier inspired a great deal of work by philosophers attempting to recover a working definition of knowledge . Major responses include: A 2001 study by Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich suggests that the effect of the Gettier problem varies by culture . In particular, people from Western countries seem more likely to agree with the judgments described in the story than do those from East Asia . Subsequent studies were unable to replicate these results. What
10580-479: The rowhouse as the architectural form defining Baltimore as "perhaps no other American city". In the mid-1790s, developers began building entire neighborhoods of the British-style rowhouses, which became the dominant house type of the city early in the 19th century. Oriole Park at Camden Yards is a Major League Baseball park, which opened in 1992 and was built as a retro style baseball park. Along with
10695-463: The salvaging of distinct cultural forms of life from a process of apparent global Westernization. With both its romantic appeal and its scientific intentions, anthropology has stood for the refusal to accept this conventional perception of homogenization toward a dominant Western model. Cultural relativism was, in part, a response to Western ethnocentrism . Ethnocentrism may take obvious forms, in which one consciously believes that one's people's arts are
10810-406: The same sound. For example, few English speakers realize that the sounds written with the letter ⟨t⟩ in the words tick and stick are phonetically different, the first being generally aspirated and the other unaspirated; a speaker of a language where this contrast is meaningful would instantly perceive them as different sounds and tend not to see them as different realizations of
10925-433: The same way, in terms of a continuum of color, people who speak different languages slice up this continuum into discrete colors in different ways. Some languages have no word that corresponds to the English word green . When people who speak such languages are shown a green chip, some identify it using their word for blue , others identify it using their word for yellow . Thus, Boas's student Melville Herskovits summed up
11040-525: The same word with different sounds indiscriminately. They thought that this meant that the languages were unorganized and lacked strict rules for pronunciation, and they took it as evidence that the languages were more primitive than their own. Boas, however, noted that the variant pronunciations were not an effect of lack of organization of sound patterns, but an effect of the fact that these languages organized sounds differently from English. The languages grouped sounds that were considered distinct in English into
11155-407: The series it selects for its consideration. In all the less controversial fields like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in
11270-578: The stress and rebelliousness that characterize American adolescence is natural and inevitable. As Marcus and Fischer point out, however, this use of relativism can be sustained only if there is ethnographic research in the United States comparable to the research conducted in Samoa. Although every decade has witnessed anthropologists conducting research in the United States, the very principles of relativism have led most anthropologists to conduct research in foreign countries. According to Marcus and Fischer, when
11385-410: The study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization. Benedict was adamant that she was not romanticizing so-called primitive societies; she was emphasizing that any understanding of the totality of humanity must be based on as wide and varied a sample of individual cultures as possible. Moreover, it is only by appreciating
11500-492: The surrounding counties through 1918, when the city acquired portions of Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County . A state constitutional amendment, approved in 1948, required a special vote of the citizens in any proposed annexation area, effectively preventing any future expansion of the city's boundaries. Streetcars enabled the development of distant neighborhoods areas such as Edmonson Village whose residents could easily commute to work downtown. Driven by migration from
11615-585: The term recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary was by philosopher and social theorist Alain Locke in 1924 to describe Lowie's "extreme cultural relativism", found in the latter's 1917 book Culture and Ethnology . The term became common among anthropologists after Boas' death in 1942, to express their synthesis of a number of ideas he had developed. Boas believed that the sweep of cultures, to be found in connection with any subspecies,
11730-549: The time period and current condition of any particular culture. Vertical relativism describes that cultures, throughout history ( vertical —i.e., passage through past and future), are products of the prevailing societal norms and conditions of their respective historical periods. Therefore, any moral or ethical judgments, made during the present, regarding past cultures' belief systems or societal practices must be firmly grounded and informed by these norms and conditions to be intellectually useful. Vertical relativism also accounts for
11845-570: The unconscious bonds of one's own culture, which inevitably bias our perceptions of and reactions to the world, and second, how to make sense of an unfamiliar culture. The principle of cultural relativism thus forced anthropologists to develop innovative methods and heuristic strategies. Between World War I and II , cultural relativism was the central tool for American anthropologists in this rejection of Western claims to universality and salvage of non-Western cultures. It functioned to transform Boas' epistemology into methodological lessons. This
11960-415: The use of gas lighting in 1816, and its population grew rapidly in the following decades, with concomitant development of culture and infrastructure. The construction of the federally funded National Road , which later became part of U.S. Route 40 , and the private Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B. & O.) made Baltimore a major shipping and manufacturing center by linking the city with major markets in
12075-753: The water, and the bodies of the remaining six were all found by May 7. Replacement of the bridge was estimated in May 2024 at a cost approaching $ 2 billion for a fall 2028 completion. Baltimore is in north-central Maryland on the Patapsco River , close to where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay . Baltimore is located on the fall line between the Piedmont Plateau and the Atlantic coastal plain , which divides Baltimore into "lower city" and "upper city". Baltimore's elevation ranges from sea level at
12190-415: Was James Lawrence Wray-Miller who provided an additional clarification tool, or caveat, of the theoretical underpinnings of cultural relativism by dividing it into two binary, analytical continuums: vertical and horizontal cultural relativism. Ultimately, these two analytical continuums share the same basic conclusion: that human morality and ethics are not static but fluid and vary across cultures depending on
12305-525: Was erected by his son Isaac in 1822 after a design by William Howard and William Small. It reflects the popular interest in Greece when the nation was securing its independence and a scholarly interest in recently published drawings of Athenian antiquities. The Phoenix Shot Tower (1828), at 234.25 feet (71.40 m) tall, was the tallest building in the United States until the time of the Civil War, and
12420-575: Was especially interested in deriving specific moral standards that are universal, although few if any anthropologists think that he was successful. There is an ambiguity in Kluckhohn's formulation that would haunt anthropologists in the years to come. It makes it clear that one's moral standards make sense in terms of one's culture. He waffles, however, on whether the moral standards of one society could be applied to another. Four years later American anthropologists had to confront this issue head-on. It
12535-402: Was established by anthropologist Franz Boas , who first articulated the idea in 1887: "civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes". However, Boas did not use the phrase "cultural relativism". The concept was spread by Boas' students, such as Robert Lowie . The first use of
12650-455: Was in the exotic and the out-of-the-way, yet even this antiquarian motivation ultimately contributed to a broader result. Anthropologists became aware of the diversity of culture. They began to see the tremendous range of its variations. From that, they commenced to envisage it as a totality, as no historian of one period or of a single people was likely to do, nor any analyst of his own type of civilization alone. They became aware of culture as
12765-412: Was repeating last year's victory and besting Connors! So my belief that McEnroe bested Connors to become this year's Wimbledon champion is true, and I had good reason to believe so (my belief was justified) — and yet, there is a sense in which I could not really have claimed to "know" that McEnroe had bested Connors because I was only accidentally right that McEnroe beat Connors — my belief was not based on
12880-601: Was selected for the school's new home. After the building's opening in 2013, the design won additional honors including an ENR National "Best of the Best" Award. Baltimore's newly rehabilitated Everyman Theatre was honored by the Baltimore Heritage at the 2013 Preservation Awards Celebration in 2013. Everyman Theatre will receive an Adaptive Reuse and Compatible Design Award as part of Baltimore Heritage's 2013 historic preservation awards ceremony. Baltimore Heritage
12995-494: Was these riots that led to the city being nicknamed "Mobtown". Soon after the city created the world's first dental college, the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery , in 1840, and shared in the world's first telegraph line , between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. , in 1844. Maryland, a slave state with limited popular support for secession , especially in the three counties of Southern Maryland, remained part of
13110-844: Was used as hunting ground by Paleo-Indians . In the early 1600s, the Susquehannock began to hunt there. People from the Province of Maryland established the Port of Baltimore in 1706 to support the tobacco trade with Europe, and established the Town of Baltimore in 1729. During the American Revolutionary War , the Second Continental Congress , fleeing Philadelphia prior to its fall to British troops , moved their deliberations to Henry Fite House on West Baltimore Street from December 1776, to February 1777, permitting Baltimore to serve briefly as
13225-572: Was used as hunting grounds by the Susquehannock living in the lower Susquehanna River valley. This Iroquoian-speaking people "controlled all of the upper tributaries of the Chesapeake" but "refrained from much contact with Powhatan in the Potomac region " and south into Virginia. Pressured by the Susquehannock, the Piscataway tribe , an Algonquian-speaking people , stayed well south of
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