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''A priori'' knowledge thus is contrasted with the 'subjective experiences' which obtain as contingencies of merely physically sensible things. For three examples, no one knows, by virtue of being aware in general, that there are two plush dog toys on my desk, that there are stars in the space beyond Earth, and that the air at 40,000ft above Earth is so sparse that you would soon die of oxygen depletion were you to try to simply breath it. Those propositions are part of ''[[a posteriori]]'' knowledge.
''A priori'' knowledge thus is contrasted with the 'subjective experiences' which obtain as contingencies of merely physically sensible things. For three examples, no one knows, by virtue of being aware in general, that there are two plush dog toys on my desk, that there are stars in the space beyond Earth, and that the air at 40,000ft above Earth is so sparse that you would soon die of oxygen depletion were you to try to simply breath it. Those propositions are part of ''[[a posteriori]]'' knowledge.
== The cognitive nature, and central problems with, ''a priori'' knowledge ==
For limited sentient agents, abstraction is the neurological function of allocating the least possible explicit knowledge of, and, hence, the least neurological energy to, the correspondence between the abstraction and that from which the abstraction is abstracted. In other words, for the sentient creature, thoughts and ideas, including the process of forming ideas from percepts, is a matter of efficiency in the use of limited active cognitive resources.
But, in so far as a given depth of ''a priori'' knowledge requires little, if any, cognitive energy to apply either to practical concepts or to empirical pursuits, such ''a priori'' knowledge is ignored or forgotten in the subconscious, even to the extent that, upon being consciously introduced to it through various words and their emotional baggage, it is not recognized as ''a priori'' In such an event, it is then easily viewed as useless, trivial, or even arbitrary. This means that, for the most ''a priori'' kind of knowledge, it is difficult to prove to most people, not because they lack it, but because it is only so subtly possessed in face of so many other, far more more energy-intensive, and promising, concerns.
So, in regard to the most ''a priori'' knowledge, people can easily position themselves skeptically in regard to it: in face of empirical knowledge, and the ease of progress and reward in the relative mastery of the empirical, deduction can so easily be construed as to seem not to have any native (''a priori'') content. And, if someone is determined that, in effect, deduction has no native content, then the only kind of reasoning by which someone of a deeply different metaphysics can seem credible to such a person is the reasoning about everyday material things and their supposed ontological primacy.
[[Category:Epistemology]]
[[Category:Epistemology]]