A priori and a posteriori

"A priori" and "A posteriori" redirect here. For other uses, see A priori (disambiguation) and A posteriori (disambiguation).

A priori ('from the earlier') and a posteriori ('from the later') are Latin phrases used in philosophy to distinguish types of knowledge, justification, or argument by their reliance on experience. A priori knowledge is independent from any experience. Examples include mathematics,^[i] tautologies and deduction from pure reason.^[ii] A posteriori knowledge depends on empirical evidence. Examples include most fields of science and aspects of personal knowledge.

The terms originate from the analytic methods found in Organon, a collection of works by Aristotle. Prior analytics (a priori) is about deductive logic, which comes from definitions and first principles. Posterior analytics (a posteriori) is about inductive logic, which comes from observational evidence.

Both terms appear in Euclid's Elements and were popularized by Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, an influential work in the history of philosophy.^[1] Both terms are primarily used as modifiers to the noun knowledge (e.g., a priori knowledge). A priori can be used to modify other nouns such as truth. Philosophers may use apriority, apriorist and aprioricity as nouns referring to the quality of being a priori.^[2]

Examples

A priori

Consider the proposition: "If George V reigned at least four days, then he reigned more than three days." This is something that one knows a priori because it expresses a statement that one can derive by reason alone.

A posteriori

Consider the proposition: "George V reigned from 1910 to 1936." This is something that (if true) one must come to know a posteriori because it expresses an empirical fact unknowable by reason alone.

Aprioricity, analyticity and necessity

Relation to the analytic–synthetic distinction

Further information: Analytic–synthetic distinction

Several philosophers, in reaction to Immanuel Kant, sought to explain a priori knowledge without appealing to, as Paul Boghossian describes as "a special faculty [intuition] ... that has never been described in satisfactory terms."^[3] One theory, popular among the logical positivists of the early 20th century, is what Boghossian calls the "analytic explanation of the a priori."^[3] The distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions was first introduced by Kant. While his original distinction was primarily drawn in terms of conceptual containment, the contemporary version of such distinction primarily involves, as American philosopher W. V. O. Quine put it, the notions of "true by virtue of meanings and independently of fact."^[4]

Analytic propositions are considered true by virtue of their meaning alone, while a posteriori propositions by virtue of their meaning and of certain facts about the world. According to the analytic explanation of the a priori, all a priori knowledge is analytic; so a priori knowledge need not require a special faculty of pure intuition, since it can be accounted for simply by one's ability to understand the meaning of the proposition in question. More simply, proponents of this explanation claimed to have reduced a dubious metaphysical faculty of pure reason to a legitimate linguistic notion of analyticity.

The analytic explanation of a priori knowledge has undergone several criticisms. Most notably, Quine argues that the analytic–synthetic distinction is illegitimate:^[5]

But for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.

Although the soundness of Quine's proposition remains uncertain, it had a powerful effect on the project of explaining the a priori in terms of the analytic.^[6]

Relation to the necessary truths and contingent truths

The metaphysical distinction between necessary and contingent truths has also been related to a priori and a posteriori knowledge.

A proposition that is necessarily true is one in which its negation is self-contradictory; it is true in every possible world. For example, considering the proposition "all bachelors are unmarried:" its negation (i.e. the proposition that some bachelors are married) is incoherent due to the concept of being unmarried (or the meaning of the word "unmarried") being tied to part of the concept of being a bachelor (or part of the definition of the word "bachelor"). To the extent that contradictions are impossible, self-contradictory propositions are necessarily false as it is impossible for them to be true. The negation of a self-contradictory proposition is, therefore, supposed to be necessarily true.

By contrast, a proposition that is contingently true is one in which its negation is not self-contradictory. Thus, it is said not to be true in every possible world. As Jason Baehr suggests, it seems plausible that all necessary propositions are known a priori, because "[s]ense experience can tell us only about the actual world and hence about what is the case; it can say nothing about what must or must not be the case."^[7]

Following Kant, some philosophers have considered the relationship between aprioricity, analyticity and necessity to be extremely close. According to Jerry Fodor, "positivism, in particular, took it for granted that a priori truths must be necessary."^[8] Since Kant, the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions has slightly changed. Analytic propositions were largely taken to be "true by virtue of meanings and independently of fact",^[4] while synthetic propositions were not—one must conduct some sort of empirical investigation, looking to the world, to determine the truth-value of synthetic propositions.

Separation

Aprioricity, analyticity and necessity have since been more clearly separated from each other. American philosopher Saul Kripke (1972), for example, provides strong arguments against this position, whereby he contends that there are necessary a posteriori truths. For example, the proposition that water is H₂O (if it is true): According to Kripke, this statement is both necessarily true, because water and H₂O are the same thing, they are identical in every possible world, and truths of identity are logically necessary; and a posteriori, because it is known only through empirical investigation. Following such considerations of Kripke and others (see Hilary Putnam), philosophers tend to distinguish the notion of aprioricity more clearly from that of necessity and analyticity.

Kripke's definitions of these terms diverge in subtle ways from Kant's. Taking these differences into account, Kripke's controversial analysis of naming as contingent and a priori would, according to Stephen Palmquist, best fit into Kant's epistemological framework by calling it "analytic a posteriori."^[iii] Aaron Sloman presented a brief defence of Kant's three distinctions (analytic/synthetic, apriori/empirical and necessary/contingent), in that it did not assume "possible world semantics" for the third distinction, merely that some part of this world might have been different.^[9]

The relationship between aprioricity, necessity and analyticity is not easy to discern. Most philosophers at least seem to agree that while the various distinctions may overlap, the notions are clearly not identical: the a priori/a posteriori distinction is epistemological; the analytic/synthetic distinction is linguistic; and the necessary/contingent distinction is metaphysical.^[10]

History

Early uses

The term a priori is Latin for 'from what comes before' (or, less literally, 'from first principles, before experience'). In contrast, the term a posteriori is Latin for 'from what comes later' (or 'after experience').

They appear in Latin translations of Euclid's Elements, a work widely considered during the early European modern period as the model for precise thinking.

An early philosophical use of what might be considered a notion of a priori knowledge (though not called by that name) is Plato's theory of recollection, related in the dialogue Meno, according to which something like a priori knowledge is knowledge inherent, intrinsic in the human mind.^{[citation needed]}

Albert of Saxony, a 14th-century logician, wrote on both a priori and a posteriori.^[11]

The early modern Thomistic philosopher John Sergeant differentiates the terms by the direction of inference regarding proper causes and effects. To demonstrate something a priori is to "Demonstrate Proper Effects from Proper Efficient Causes" and likewise to demonstrate a posteriori is to demonstrate "Proper Efficient Causes from Proper Effects", according to his 1696 work The Method to Science Book III, Lesson IV, Section 7.

G. W. Leibniz introduced a distinction between a priori and a posteriori criteria for the possibility of a notion in his (1684) short treatise "Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas".^[12] A priori and a posteriori arguments for the existence of God appear in his Monadology (1714).^[12]

George Berkeley outlined the distinction in his 1710 work A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (para. XXI).

Immanuel Kant

The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1781) advocated a blend of rationalist and empiricist theories. Kant says, "Although all our cognition begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from [is caused by] experience."^[13] According to Kant, a priori cognition is transcendental, or based on the form of all possible experience, while a posteriori cognition is empirical, based on the content of experience:^[13]

It is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself sensuous impressions [sense data] giving merely the occasion [opportunity for a cause to produce its effect].

Contrary to contemporary usages of the term, Kant believes that a priori knowledge is not entirely independent of the content of experience. Unlike the rationalists, Kant thinks that a priori cognition, in its pure form, that is without the admixture of any empirical content, is limited to the deduction of the conditions of possible experience. These a priori, or transcendental, conditions are seated in one's cognitive faculties, and are not provided by experience in general or any experience in particular (although an argument exists that a priori intuitions can be "triggered" by experience).

Kant nominated and explored the possibility of a transcendental logic with which to consider the deduction of the a priori in its pure form. Space, time and causality are considered pure a priori intuitions. Kant reasoned that the pure a priori intuitions are established via his transcendental aesthetic and transcendental logic. He claimed that the human subject would not have the kind of experience that it has were these a priori forms not in some way constitutive of him as a human subject. For instance, a person would not experience the world as an orderly, rule-governed place unless time, space and causality were determinant functions in the form of perceptual faculties, i. e., there can be no experience in general without space, time or causality as particular determinants thereon. The claim is more formally known as Kant's transcendental deduction and it is the central argument of his major work, the Critique of Pure Reason. The transcendental deduction argues that time, space and causality are ideal as much as real. In consideration of a possible logic of the a priori, this most famous of Kant's deductions has made the successful attempt in the case for the fact of subjectivity, what constitutes subjectivity and what relation it holds with objectivity and the empirical.

Johann Fichte

After Kant's death, a number of philosophers saw themselves as correcting and expanding his philosophy, leading to the various forms of German Idealism. One of these philosophers was Johann Fichte. His student (and critic), Arthur Schopenhauer, accused him of rejecting the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge:

... Fichte who, because the thing-in-itself had just been discredited, at once prepared a system without any thing-in-itself. Consequently, he rejected the assumption of anything that was not through and through merely our representation, and therefore let the knowing subject be all in all or at any rate produce everything from its own resources. For this purpose, he at once did away with the essential and most meritorious part of the Kantian doctrine, the distinction between a priori and a posteriori and thus that between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. For he declared everything to be a priori, naturally without any evidence for such a monstrous assertion; instead of these, he gave sophisms and even crazy sham demonstrations whose absurdity was concealed under the mask of profundity and of the incomprehensibility ostensibly arising therefrom. Moreover, he appealed boldly and openly to intellectual intuition, that is, really to inspiration.

— Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, §13

See also

• A priori probability
• A posteriori necessity
• Ab initio
• Abductive reasoning
• Deductive reasoning
• Inductive reasoning
• Off the verandah
• Relativized a priori
• Tabula rasa
• Transcendental empiricism
• Transcendental hermeneutic phenomenology
• Transcendental nominalism

References

Notes

1. Some associationist philosophers have contended that mathematics comes from experience and is not a form of any a priori knowledge (Macleod 2016)
2. Galen Strawson has stated that an a priori argument is one in which "you can see that it is true just lying on your couch. You don't have to get up off your couch and go outside and examine the way things are in the physical world. You don't have to do any science." (Sommers 2003)
3. In this pair of articles, Stephen Palmquist demonstrates that the context often determines how a particular proposition should be classified. A proposition that is synthetic a posteriori in one context might be analytic a priori in another. (Palmquist 1987b, pp. 269, 273)

Citations

1. Bird 1995, p. 439.
2. Kitcher 2001
3. Boghossian 2003, p. 363
4. Quine 1951, p. 21
5. Quine 1951, p. 34
6. Fred-Rivera, Ivette (10 August 2022). A Historical and Systematic Perspective on A Priori Knowledge and Justification. Springer Nature. pp. 40–45. ISBN 978-3-031-06874-4.
7. Baehr 2006, §3
8. Fodor 1998, p. 86
9. Sloman 1965.
10. Baehr 2006, §2-3
11. Hoiberg 2010, p. 1
12. Look 2007.
13. Kant 1781, p. 1

Sources

• Baehr, Jason S. (2006). "A Priori and A Posteriori". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Bird, Graham (1995). Honderich, Ted (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-866132-0.
• Boghossian, Paul Artin (2003) [1997]. "14: Analyticity". In Hale, Bob; Wright, Crispin (eds.). A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 978-0631213260.
• Fodor, Jerry (1998). Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198236368.
• Hoiberg, Dale H., ed. (2010). "a priori knowledge". Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. I: A-Ak – Bayes (15th ed.). Chicago, Illinois. ISBN 978-1-59339-837-8.
• Kant, Immanuel (1781). Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason]. Im Insel-Verlag.
• Kitcher, Philip (2001). "A Priori Knowledge Revisited". In Boghossian, Paul; Peacocke, Christopher (eds.). New Essays on the A Priori. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199241279.^{[failed verification]}
• Look, Brandon C. (22 December 2007). "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 ed.). Retrieved 22 May 2020 – via Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
• Macleod, Christopher (25 August 2016). "John Stuart Mill". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 ed.) – via Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
• Palmquist, Stephen (December 1987b). "A Priori Knowledge in Perspective: (II) Naming, Necessity and the Analytic A Posteriori". The Review of Metaphysics. 41 (2): 255–282.
• Quine, Willard Van Orman (1951). "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". The Philosophical Review. 60 (1): 20–43. doi:10.2307/2181906. JSTOR 2181906.
• Sloman, A. (1 October 1965). "'Necessary', 'a priori' and 'analytic'". Analysis. 26 (1): 12–16. doi:10.1093/analys/26.1.12. S2CID 17118371.
• Sommers, Tamler (March 2003). Jarman, Casey (ed.). "Galen Strawson (interview)". Believer Magazine. 1 (1). San Francisco, CA: McSweeney's McMullens. Retrieved 10 July 2013.

Further reading

• Descartes, René (1641). In Cottingham; et al. (eds.). Meditationes de prima philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstratur [Meditations on First Philosophy]. Archived from the original on 15 July 2013. Retrieved 25 August 2006.
• — (1984). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. 2. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521288088.
• Fodor, Jerry (21 October 2004). "Water's Water Everywhere". London Review of Books. 26 (21)..
• Greenberg, Robert (2001). Kant's Theory of a Priori Knowledge. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. ISBN 978-0271020839. Archived from the original on 1 September 2006. Retrieved 30 May 2007.
• Heisenberg, Werner (2007) [1958]. Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. pp. 76–92. ISBN 978-0061209192.
• Hume, David (2008) [1777]. Millican, Peter (ed.). An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Oxford, UK: Oxford university Press. ISBN 978-0199549900. Archived from the original on 7 October 2008. Retrieved 28 August 2006.
• Jenkins, C. S. (May 2008). "A Priori Knowledge: Debates and Developments". Philosophy Compass. 3 (3): 436–450. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00136.x. Archived from the original on 5 January 2013.
• Kant, Immanuel (1783). Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik [Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics]. Archived from the original on 31 August 2000.
• Kripke, Saul (2013) [1972]. "Naming and Necessity". Semantics of Natural Language. Synthese Library (2nd ed.). Springer. ISBN 978-9027703101.
• Leibniz, Gottfried (1976) [1714]. "Monadology". In Loemker, Leroy E. (ed.). Philosophical Papers and Letters: A Selection. Synthese Historical Library. Vol. 2 (2nd ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ISBN 978-9027706935.
• Locke, John (1689). Nidditch, Peter H. (ed.). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198245957. Archived from the original on 29 August 2006. Retrieved 29 August 2006.
• Palmquist, Stephen (September 1987a). "A Priori Knowledge in Perspective: (I) Mathematics, Method and Pure Intuition". The Review of Metaphysics. 41 (1): 3–22.
• Plato (1997) [380 B.C.]. "Meno". In Cooper, John M.; Hutchinson, D. S. (eds.). Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. ISBN 978-0872203495.

External links

• Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "A Priori Justification and Knowledge". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• A priori and a posteriori at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project
• A priori and a posteriori at PhilPapers
• "A priori and a posteriori". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• A priori / a posteriori – in the Philosophical Dictionary online.
• "Rationalism vs. Empiricism" – an article by Peter Markie in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.