a posteriori
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 1.97 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
5
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
adv
In a manner that deduces theories from facts.
Example Sentences
- "What Locke calls "knowledge" they have called "a priori knowledge"; what he calls "opinion" or "belief" they have called "a posteriori" or "empirical knowledge"."
- "FALLACIES of the modern worldview have to do with the conception of the world as substance or machinery, mistaking abstractions for reality, confusing origins and truth, failing to attribute feeling to things that feel, recognising ethics as exclusively anthropocentric, thinking a posteriori, objectifying facts as separated from values, reducing the complex to the simple and dividing knowledge into distinct disciplines that produce experts who are often wrong."
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Medieval Latin ā posteriōrī (“involving reasoning from effect to cause, from experience to theory”, literally “from what follows”). Popularized from the 19th century in reference to the work of Immanuel Kant.
Inflected Forms
more a posteriori (comparative)
most a posteriori (superlative)