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Topic: A priori knowledge

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A priori and a posteriori knowledge

A priori

Analytic proposition

Empirical knowledge

A posteriori

Synthetic proposition

Platonic doctrine of recollection

Epistemology

Alfred Ayer

Immanuel Kant

Platonic realism

Aristotle

God

George Berkeley

The Form of the Good

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Gary Locke

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	A Priori and A Posteriori [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
		The a priori/a posteriori distinction is epistemological and should not be confused with the metaphysical distinction between the necessary and the contingent or the semantical or logical distinction between the analytic and the synthetic.
		The distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge thus broadly corresponds to the distinction between empirical and nonempirical knowledge.
		An a priori proposition is one that is knowable a priori and an a priori argument is one the premises of which are a priori propositions.
	www.utm.edu /research/iep/a/apriori.htm (5580 words)

	A priori - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		A priori (philosophy) - a priori is used in philosophy to refer to a type of knowledge that is independent of experience or non-empirical.
		A priori (languages) - a priori constructed languages are those which try to categorize their vocabulary, either to express an underlying philosophical system, or to make it easier to memorize the completely new vocabulary.
		A priori (statistics) - in statistics, a priori knowledge refers to a knowledge of the actual population, rather than that estimated by observation.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/A_priori (306 words)

	20th WCP: Logic: An Empirical Study of A Priori Truths
		A priori knowledge either is evident or is derived from evident premisses by means of correct reasoning.
		Since a statement is a priori with respect to a conceptual framework, it seems possible that a single statement might be a priori with respect to one framework but not a priori with respect to another.
		Still, mathematical knowledge does come close to a priori knowledge as traditionally conceived, once the theories/frameworks become entrenched so that their fundamental principles are evident to those working within the frameworks.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/Logi/LogiKear.htm (3050 words)

	10
		However, it is important to realise that the status of such knowledge as a priori will be quite different from what rationalist philosophers have generally had in mind when they employed the phrase 'a priori knowledge'.
		For example, innate a priori knowledge of folk-psychology would not consist of beliefs which can be discovered to be true just by thinking of their subject-matter; nor would their content be intuitively certain.
		This is in stark contrast with the traditional rationalist conception of a priori knowledge where, since the belief in question can be known to be true by thought alone, it is often felt that the knowledge that we know it a priori can also be established by the very same method.
	www.philosophy.umd.edu /Faculty/pcarruthers/HKHN-10.htm (5514 words)

	A PRIORI KNOWLEDGE REVISITED
		The account of a priori knowledge is embedded within a general approach to knowledge (the psychologistic approach) according to which whether or not a state of true belief counts as a state of knowledge depends on the causal process that generated that state.
		Dividing items of knowledge according to the causal factors that generated the knowledge might be useful for a number of philosophical and psychological purposes, but none of the divisions I’ve mentioned attributes any special role to a kind of knowledge, a unique function that it can fulfil in our activities as knowers.
		The knowledge of contemporary mathematicians may be proximally produced by their reflections on what they have absorbed from the past, reflections that do not depend on any specific sensory input, but it is ultimately dependent on the collective experiences of the tradition in which they stand.
	www.columbia.edu /~psk16/apkr.htm (9660 words)

	apriori defined...
		A priori is the basis for developing the mind's framework toward the motivation to exercise for the promotion of health and the improvement of physical performance.
		A priori is the basis of the mind's framework that precedes innate physical ability for the "common sense" approach during interaction with exercise machines, sports objects, playing fields and competitors.
		A priori is involved in the constant struggle to develop and conform to standards and tradition without detracting from discovery and creativity.
	www.aprioriathletics.com /aprioridefn.html (788 words)

	Critique of Pure Reason
		If our faculty of knowledge makes any such addition, it may be that we are not in a position to distinguish it from the raw material, until with long practice of attention we have become skilled in separating it.
		Its purpose is not to extend knowledge, but only to correct it, and to supply a touchstone of the value, or lack of value, of all a priori knowledge.
		These a priori possessions of the understanding, since they have not to be sought for without, cannot remain hidden from of our apprehending them in their completeness of judging as to their value or lack of value, and so of rightly appraising them.
	www.marxists.org /reference/subject/ethics/kant/reason/ch01.htm (5339 words)

	CHAPTER VIII
		Thus our knowledge of the general propositions of mathematics (and the same applies to logic) must be accounted for otherwise than our (merely probable) knowledge of empirical generalizations such as 'all men are mortal'.
		His chief reason in favour of this view is that we seem to have a priori knowledge as to space and time and causality and comparison, but not as to the actual crude material of sensation.
		Thus our a priori knowledge, if it is not erroneous, is not merely knowledge about the constitution of our minds, but is applicable to whatever the world may contain, both what is mental and what is non-mental.
	www.ditext.com /russell/rus8.html (2461 words)

	A Critique of Kant's Foundational Epistemology
		Through the use of a transcendental argument, Kant argued that synthetic a priori knowledge such as intuitions of space and time and categories such as causality and quantity had to be presupposed for us to be able to make sense of the world.
		From these notions of necessity and universality, Kant developed the notion of synthetic a priori knowledge (knowledge which was true independently of experience) and argued that intuitions of time and space and various categories of quantity, quality, relation and modality were cases of such knowledge that all human beings knew.
		Thus knowledge may be considered to have its foundations in practice (in “forms of life” or the actual interactions of human beings) without any great need for foundational a priori knowledge.
	www.markwmoss.com /kant_and_synthetic_a_priori_knowledge.htm (1591 words)

	UC Davis Philosophy 102, Theory of Knowledge: Contemporary Epistemology IV: How We Know
		Empiricists think that a priori knowledge is limited to propositions which are true by virtue of logic or meaning, while rationalists think that we have a priori knowledge about substantive features of the world.
		Knowledge can be gained by mere "analysis" of a sentence, a process that does not require any appeal to experience.
		The gist of his argument is that a priori knowledge is a necessary condition for empirical (a posteriori) knowledge.
	www-philosophy.ucdavis.edu /mattey/phi102/contemp4.html (2502 words)

	Quodlibet Online Journal: On A Priori Knowledge (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		As Pollock states, the source of such knowledge is "quite mysterious" and "comprises one of the most problematic areas" in philosophy (11).
		Upon such axioms a greater body of a priori knowledge is then established.
		Such knowledge can be said to be a priori only in the sense that substantial justification exists for our belief that such relations will universally adhere, even when the particular relation does not belong to actual states of reality (e.g., regarding future affairs or hypothetical affairs).
	www.quodlibet.net /apriori.shtml (1741 words)

	20th WCP: What Anti-Individualists Cannot Know A Priori
		First, I suggest that the incompatibilist a priori must be a stipulative one, since in none of the main philosophical traditions does knowledge of the contents of one’s thoughts count as a priori.
		Accordingly, for the logical positivist a priori knowledge is knowledge of analytic propositions; and so, knowledge of any proposition about the contents of one's own mind (such as that expressed by (B)'s second premise) must count as a posteriori.
		Note that, if we cash out the incompatibilists' "a priori" as the property of being knowable either by thought experiments, introspection, or inference, then sense-datum theories would have to be construed as claiming that we have "a priori" knowledge of empirical propositions.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/TKno/TKnoNucc.htm (2633 words)

	Albert Casullo - A Priori Justification - Reviewed by Panayot Butchvarov, University of Iowa - Philosophical Reviews - ...
		Analytic epistemology has focused on a posteriori, empirical knowledge, perhaps because of its early ties to British empiricism, and even its general accounts of knowledge seek conformity mainly with alleged examples of empirical knowledge, e.g., what make of car someone owns or whether what one sees is a barn.
		Its title is âa priori justification,â not âa priori knowledge,â for the good reason that there may be false beliefs that are justified a priori (mathematics is rife with examples).
		But by describing himself as âanalyzing the concept of a priori justification,â often relying on thought-experiments and âintuitionsâ of whether âwe would sayâ that a certain belief is justified in a certain imaginary situation, he would seem to be at most a philosophical naturalist.
	ndpr.nd.edu /review.cfm?id=1350 (2201 words)

	Wikinfo \| A priori (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		A priori knowledge is propositional knowledge that can be had without experience.
		Pre-a priori thinkers included rationalists such as Rene Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz, who argued that knowledge is gained through reason, not experience.
		He argues that propositions known a priori are necessarily true, while propositions known a posteriori are contingent, because a priori knowledge has always been true, according to Kant.
	www.wikinfo.org /wiki.php?title=A_priori (230 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Although both reject a priori knowledge, they offer different empiricist accounts of the knowledge alleged by their opponents to be a priori.
		Presumably, when Kant speaks of the “source” of knowledge, he does not mean the source of the belief in question, but the source of its justification.
		As we saw earlier, the traditional concept of a priori knowledge is the concept of knowledge whose justification is nonexperiential.
	www.unl.edu /philosop/people/faculty/casullo/overdtrmn.htm (6423 words)

	Ephilosopher :: Metaphysics and Epistemology :: A priori certain knowledge (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		But it couldn't be called a priori, in my view, since you didn't (and couldn't) have known that the terms were equivalent just by exercise of pure reason.
		But whether a sentence is known to be true a priori does not depend on whether we learned the meanings of the sentence a priori, but on whether, already knowing what the sentence means, we can determine its truth value independently of experience.
		You objection that 2+2 =4 is not a priori because if we use a different number base the answer will be different, is not much of an objection since that only means that we happen to be changing what we mean by the equation.
	www.ephilosopher.com /phpBB_14-action-viewtopic-topic-4032.html (3540 words)

	SITUATION ASSESSMENT FOR AUTONOMOUS UNDERWATER VEHICLES USING A PRIORI CONTEXTUAL KNOWLEDGE
		The idea is that Orca is initially given a set of contextual schemas obtained by knowledge acquisition techniques from experts on AUV missions, then, over time, the program will add information about new contexts it encounters as well as adjust the information about existing contexts based on its experience.
		All of Orca's contextual knowledge is represented explicitly as contextual schemas.
		knowledge about the semantics of symbolic information the program uses: e.g., ``deep'' in this context does not mean the same as in the middle of the ocean, even though the same (fuzzy) term may be used in the same rules governing the depth envelope in both contexts [15].
	www.umcs.maine.edu /pub/MaineSAIL/ArrittTurnerUUST03.htm (4472 words)

	[No title]
		A priori knowledge is knowledge that is not based on observation of the physical world.
		a priori knowledge is knowledge that exists in the mind before any experience with or observation of the physical world.
		A posteriori knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge that comes directly from observation of the physical world.
	www.theologicalstudies.org /apriori.html (155 words)

	Philosophical Dictionary: Antecedent-Aquinas
		An a priori argument, then, is taken to reason deductively from abstract general premises, while an a posteriori argument relies upon specific information derived from sense perception.
		The necessary truth of an a priori proposition can be determined by reason alone, but the contingent truth of an a posteriori proposition can be discovered only by reference to some matter of fact.
		Kant argued that synthetic a priori judgments are preconditions for any experience and thus provide a basis for mathematical and scientific knowledge.
	www.philosophypages.com /dy/a5.htm (1113 words)

	Ordinary Language, Conventionalism, and A Priori Knowledge
		Searle's knowledge is "based on knowing how to play baseball, which is inter alia having internalized a set of rules." Searle goes on to suggest that his knowledge of linguistic characterizations like S is of a similar kind.
		Nevertheless, philosophers could still be entitled to make a priori claims about how 'we' use certain terms if they were 'authoritative' in their community with respect to the use of those terms.
		Unfortunately, in those philosophically disputed cases for which such a priori intuitions are frequently brought to bear, there may be no consensus among philosophers about how the terms should be used, and thus no facts about what 'we' would say to appeal to.
	www.yorku.ca /hjackman/papers/conv-and-apriori.html (3710 words)

	A Priori vs. A Posteriori Knowledge (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		A priori knowledge is knowledge that we can have "prior to experience".
		We can arrive at such knowledge through reason alone (sitting in our armchairs by the fire, as it were, and simply using our powers of reasoning).
		A posteriori knowledge is knowledge that we can have only after we have certain experiences.
	www.unc.edu /~theis/phil32/apriori.html (118 words)

	10
		However, the term is also used adjectivally to describe a type of knowledge, that is, knowledge which is gained independently of sense experience.
		Although it is possible to conceive a number of non-sensible modes of knowledge (e.g., mystical insight, prescience), the module will be restricted to knowledge gained by reason, somehow independently of the information provided by the senses.
		Throughout the 19th century, it seemed clear that mathematical knowledge is a priori, and according to Kant, synthetic a priori.
	www.ditext.com /clay/10.html (1327 words)

	Certain Doubts » a priori knowledge (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		The dominant recent response on the rationalist (pro-a priori) side to Benacerraf-style worries has been the conceptualist one, featuring prominent thinkers like Peacocke, Boghossian, Jackson, perhaps Hale and C. Wright, and a host of their followers.
		The approach concentrates upon our grasp of relevant concepts and upon their alleged a priori connections, and attempts to account for a priori knowledge in terms of the grasp.
		It attempts to preserve realistically factual character or substantiality of a priori knowledge.
	bengal-ng.missouri.edu /~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/index.php?cat=7 (440 words)

	Robert Greenberg: Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge
		Robert Greenberg: Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge
		Hardback: $52.00 SH The prevailing interpretation of Kant's First Critique in Anglo-American philosophy views his theory of a priori knowledge as basically a theory about the possibility of empirical knowledge (or experience), or the a priori conditions for that possibility (the representations of space and time and the categories).
		Instead, Robert Greenberg argues that Kant is more fundamentally concerned with the possibility of a priori knowledge—the very possibility of the possibility of empirical knowledge in the first place.
	www.psupress.org /books/titles/0-271-02083-0.html (183 words)

	EpistPapersBySubject.html
		"Knowledge, Animal and Reflective: A Reply to Michael Williams"
		Calvin, Plantinga, and the Natural Knowledge of God: A Response to Beversluis
		"Knowledge, Justification and Truth: A Sellarsarian Approach to Epistemology" (1969 - Ph.
	www.ucs.louisiana.edu /~kak7409/EpistPapersBySubject.html (1631 words)

	Return of the A Priori
		The focus is on twentieth-century contributions to these issues, but most essays also address earlier discussions at some length, and the essays that focus on Kant also relate his views to more recent discussions.
		Kant's A Priori Methods for Recognizing Necessary Truths
		For information on how to order this book, please click here.
	www.ucalgary.ca /uofc/departments/UP/0-919491/0-919491-18-9.html (61 words)

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