A priori definitions and example sentences on Wordnik

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Definitions (10)

American Heritage Dictionary (4)

adjective Proceeding from a known or assumed cause to a necessarily related effect; deductive.
adjective Derived by or designating the process of reasoning without reference to particular facts or experience.
adjective Knowable without appeal to particular experience.

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Century Dictionary (2)

From the former; from that which precedes; hence, from antecedent to consequent, from condition to conditioned, or from cause to effect. Since the fourteenth century, the phrase demonstratio a priori (first found in Albert of Saxony, died 1390) has been commonly employed, instead of the earlier expression demonstratio propter quid, to mean proof proceeding from causes or first principles: opposed to demonstratio a posteriori, or demonstratio quia, which proceeds from effect to cause, and simply proves the fact without showing why it must be as it is. In the eighteenth century demonstratio a priori was applied to reasoning from a given notion to the conditions which such notion involves. But since Kant, a priori, used as an adjective and frequently placed before the noun, has been, applied to cognitions which, though they may come to us in experience, have their origin in the nature of the mind, and are independent of experience. Demonstration is perfect, when it proceedeth from the proper cause to the effect, called of the scholemen, à priore. Blundeville, Arte of Logicke (1599), vi. 19. Thus when we argue from the ideas we have of immensity, eternity, necessary existence, and the like, that such perfections can reside but in one being, and thence conclude that there can be but one supreme God, … this is an argument a priori. Clarke. General truths, which at the same time bear the character of an inward necessity, must be independent of experience—clear and certain by themselves. They are therefore called a priori, while that which is simply taken from experience is said to be, in ordinary parlance, known a posteriori or empirically only. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. by Max Müller. As used in a psychological sense, knowledge a posteriori is a synonym for knowledge empirical, or from experience; and, consequently, is adventitious to the mind, as subsequent to, and in consequence of, the exercise of its faculties of observation. Knowledge a priori, on the contrary, called likewise native, pure, or transcendental knowledge, embraces those principles which, as the condition of the exercise of its faculties of observation and thought, are, consequently, not the result of that exercise. True it is that, chronologically considered, our a priori is not antecedent to our a posteriori knowledge; for the internal conditions of experience can only operate when an object of experience has been presented. Sir W. Hamilton.
A priori Philosopher a philosopher who believes in the existence of a priori cognition in the Kantian sense of the term; an apriorist.