How to Use a priori in a Sentence
a priori
adjective- There's no a priori reason to think your expenses will remain the same in a new city.
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The look of the films is something that can’t be determined a priori of the rest of its conception.
—Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 16 Apr. 2018
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That set of capabilities have to be put in place a priori, and not post facto, on this thing, to be able to say, OK, something happened.
—WSJ, 18 Dec. 2017
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But the non-black people at the conference could not comprehend or explain this a priori species division between the human and the slave.
—Frank B. Wilderson Iii, Harper's Magazine, 30 Mar. 2020
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If evolution is not taken as an a priori, then these evidences are far less compelling.
—Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine, 22 July 2012
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For anyone with a truly open mind, the a priori case for UFOs as a scientific anomaly is firmly established.
—Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 2 July 2018
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In-group variation rarely leads to a re-consideration of a priori categories and studies with negative results do not get the same space, in journals or in the press...
—Neuroskeptic, Discover Magazine, 15 July 2017
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But this season, Jamie is very much like Ambrose, and there’s something dark inside them that seems to be a priori — a given, not something that can be explained, or apologized for, or looked at to see if it can be corrected.
—Jennifer Vineyard, New York Times, 26 Mar. 2020
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By the 1970s Richter had also become intrigued with the possibilities of pictures that originated not in a preselected image, but in an a priori set of rules.
—Susan Tallman, The New York Review of Books, 25 Apr. 2020
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Our cognitive analysis is not intended to debunk every anti-GMO claim a priori.
—Stefaan Blancke, Scientific American, 18 Aug. 2015
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In the nascent American Republic, where some humans could vote and most others were in coverture to their voting husbands or were the property of those men, the notion of majority representation was corrupted a priori.
—Shannon Pufahl, The New York Review of Books, 21 Apr. 2020
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The problem is a priori identifying that one small zone, which has proved notoriously difficult to do, even with the most sophisticated, high resolution models.
—Jason Samenow, Washington Post, 11 Sep. 2020
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For Kant, reason is universal, infallible and a priori—meaning independent of experience.
—Yoram Hazony, WSJ, 6 Apr. 2018
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'a priori.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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