Famous quotes containing the word priori:
“Science asks no questions about the ontological pedigree or a priori character of a theory, but is content to judge it by its performance; and it is thus that a knowledge of nature, having all the certainty which the senses are competent to inspire, has been attained—a knowledge which maintains a strict neutrality toward all philosophical systems and concerns itself not with the genesis or a priori grounds of ideas.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)
“Chaucer sawed life in half and out tumbled hundreds of unpremeditated lives, because he didn’t have the cast-iron grid of a priori coherence that makes reading Goethe, Shakespeare, or Dante an exercise in searching for signs of life among the conventions, compulsions, self-justifications, proofs, wise saws, simple but powerful messages, and poetry.”
—Marvin Mudrick (1921–1986)
“The so-called law of induction cannot possibly be a law of logic, since it is obviously a proposition with a sense.—Nor, therefore, can it be an a priori law.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)