Etymology

a posteriori

Today it means: Involving induction of theories from facts. Full definition →

Medieval Latin ā posteriōrī
Ask AI about its historyChatGPTClaudePerplexityGoogle AIGrok

The story

  1. Medieval Latin · learned borrowing fromā posteriōrī“involving reasoning from effect to cause, from experience to theory”
  2. English todaya posteriori

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.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.