Monday, 9 March 2015

Illustrating your answer, explain the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. (15 mark)

A priori knowledge is knowledge which does not require sense experience to be known to true, i.e. if you know what the proposition means, you don't need to check experience to know whether it's true. A common example of an a priori proposition is 'all bachelors are unmarried men' - in knowing the meaning/definition of the word 'bachelor' (an unmarried man), we can know that the proposition is true, without having to confirm this through experience. Another example is 'all squares have four sides' - again, we know that by definition the word 'square' is a four-sided shape, confirming that the proposition is true. Empiricists believe that all a priori knowledge is analytic (true or false just in the virtue of the meaning on the words). Rationalists argue that it is possible for us to have a priori knowledge about the way the world is (synthetic knowledge), and this forms the basis of the rationalist/empiricist debate.

A posteriori knowledge is knowledge that isn't know to us through the meaning of the words, but can only be established through experience - for example, 'snow is white' or 'grass is green' - we only know that this is true because of our sense experiences of snow. We can't know these two propositions analytically, because the word 'grass' doesn't necessarily equate to the colour green. Empiricists believe that all a posteriori knowledge is synthetic (true or false because of the way the world is). They also claim that this type of knowledge is the most meaningful as we can use it to learn about the world, whereas they consider a priori/analytic knowledge to be less useful.

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