{"id":390,"date":"2018-04-26T11:20:32","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T15:20:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=390"},"modified":"2019-08-16T11:15:44","modified_gmt":"2019-08-16T15:15:44","slug":"word-of-the-week-a-priori","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2018\/04\/26\/word-of-the-week-a-priori\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Week! A Priori"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Yes, I know it is two words, but you will hardly ever encounter this phrase or its counterpart a posteriori<\/em> outside academia. Inside it, the Latin term speaks volumes and appears often enough to merit recognition in the blog. The phrase occurs as adjective and adverb. I often run into it, casually, as a noun. That usage does not appear in my references (but I like it anyway).<\/p>\n

I first puzzled over\u00a0a priori\u00a0<\/em>concepts\u00a0(and had more than a few of them toppled)in the early 1980s, when I was an undergrad at The University of Virginia.\u00a0 As I came to understand it then, the term meant “principles we assume to be true with out any further questioning,” an idea that I came to see as fundamentally at odds with academic inquiry. A priori\u00a0<\/em>ideas were, in my graduate program at Indiana heavy with postmodern literary theory, lampooned.<\/p>\n

I suppose this a priori<\/em>\u00a0statement would get the founder of UVA, Thomas Jefferson, in trouble were he to write in an essay for some of my grad-school classes:<\/p>\n

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That Declaration<\/a> gave us one of the most famous a priori<\/em> statements in recorded history and began a revolution that one hopes has not ended. But wait.\u00a0It appears that I need more schooling before I make any claims\u00a0a priori<\/em>.\u00a0 I assumed something, and as a student once said in class, ” ‘assume’ makes an ass of ‘u’ and me.”<\/p>\n

When I open the pages of\u00a0The American Heritage Dictionary<\/em>, my sense of our phrase comes third. Instead, the reference book gives\u00a0“proceeding from a known or assumed cause” pride of place. The OED Online<\/a> puts my sense of a priori<\/em> second, as “in accordance with one’s previous knowledge or prepossessions.”\u00a0 The dictionary also provides a clear 1862 example, “Reason commands us, in matters of experience, to be guided by observational evidence, and not by \u00e0 priori<\/em> principles.”<\/p>\n

We have lost the accent over the “a,” but I lost more in my reasoning without further investigation.\u00a0 Both reference works imply that\u00a0a priori<\/em> ideas do not provide the final word for anything. They are, instead, merely presuppositions for making future claims. That works well with fundamental principles of academic reasoning. H.W Fowler’s classic\u00a0A Dictionary of Modern English Usage<\/em> links a priori<\/em> reasoning to deduction. Mr. Holmes would be proud of us.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A priori<\/em> reasoning works well outside revolutionary manifestos, the Humanities, or detective work; it is, in fact, essential in the natural sciences. In physics, bodies near the Earth fall at 32 feet per second per second. It was not until Galileo’s era<\/a> that we came to understand how gravity is related to the mass of a planet and would not be the same on other heavenly bodies. Empirical evidence followed.\u00a0 That new scientific principle became, then, a new\u00a0a priori<\/em>\u00a0concept for those working in the field.<\/p>\n

With the end of the semester nigh, consider the a priori<\/em> concepts you have had challenged or overturned in your life’s journey. More will follow,\u00a0a posteriori<\/em>\u00a0when learning new ideas. I leave that up to the reader to learn, along with the meanings of\u00a0a posteriori<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This blog will continue all summer, so nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.<\/p>\n

See all of our Words of the Week\u00a0here<\/a>. If\u00a0 you want to read more about whether Sherlock Holmes employs deductive or inductive reasoning, have a peek here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Images courtesy of Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, I know it is two words, but you will hardly ever encounter this phrase or its counterpart a posteriori outside academia. Inside it, the Latin term speaks volumes and appears often enough to merit recognition in the blog. The phrase occurs as adjective and adverb. I often run into it, casually, as a noun. … Continue reading Word of the Week! A Priori<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1181,2516,1173,87406,3715,2520],"tags":[2522],"class_list":["post-390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-culture","category-academic-writing","category-grammar","category-loan-word","category-stem","category-usage","tag-word-of-the-week"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-6i","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}