A Priori Knowledge

a priori knowledge

- The term “a priori” comes from Latin and means “from the earlier”. A priori knowledge means knowledge that is independent from experience and can be achieved by logical reasoning. For example, you can say: “If my mother’s new jacket cost 100€, then it must have cost less than 110€.” This is an example of a priori knowledge, because you can conclude this statement by reason only. a posteriori knowledge

- The term “a posteriori” comes from Latin and means “from the latter”. A posteriori knowledge means knowledge that depends of our empirical knowledge (sense experiences) and experiences. All posteriori knowledge can be false, because it is based on our sense perception and our interpretations of experiences. An example of

When doing an experiment with the scientific method, you should only change one variable at a time and keep the other variables constant. For example you could study if crickets chirp more when it’s warmer. The question is “Do crickets chirp more when it’s warmer?” The hypothesis could be that yes, they do. The experiment could be made by placing crickets into containers and changing the temperature. The data could be collected by simply counting the chirps for example per minute. After that you would draw a conclusion, and if your data would match the hypothesis, you could arrive to a conclusion that crickets chirp more when it’s warmer. Then you would communicate your results to other researchers and see if your experiment is reliable and

In the experiment a group of workers was placed in an assembly line in a room that was separate from the main assembly line. In this separate room variations in working conditions were modified and also monitored. Only one variable at time was changed in the room, such as the amount of lighting and the frequency of breaks. At first one might think that the better the lighting or the more breaks, the better is the working environment and the worker’s productivity. But then the environment was made worse with lowered levels of lighting and by allowing fewer breaks, but still the productivity rose. In the given example the workers worked harder even in worse conditions – this might be because of the Hawthorne effect. Hawthorne effect basically means reacting to the fact that you are being observed and changing your behavior in response to that. That creates a problem in human research, because when people know that they are being studied, they might change their behavior and the researchers can end up with false