A priori

I chose the word “a priori” because I needed a word to justify my experience and a reference to my experience as a physical therapist testing for passive adduction ability. This word reflects issues concerning the proposition or claim that if your pelvis is in an anteriorly rotated state and you line the femur up with the body in a position that we often call the Ober’s Test you can justify the fact that the leg can’t adduct because of the osseous impingement components of the state the acetabulum is in. A priori is an argument that says you can see that it’s true just by laying a person on their side and you don’t have to necessarily rely on previous research or science because the a priori knowledge or justification is independent of my experience. It’s a word that is used as an adjective to modify the noun knowledge. It’s an adjective that can also modify other nouns such as truth. The word a priori is Latin and means “from what comes before”. In this case the activity that came before femur restriction in this position was acetabular orientation. My favorite description of this word comes from Wikipedia:

“Proponents of this explanation, a priori, claim to reduce dubious metaphysical faculty of pure reason to a legitimate linguistic notion of analyticity.”

Basically what it means is that I am using a word to describe a priori algorithm of a class of algorithms for learning association rules as they relate to femoral acetabular adduction when an individual is not first placed into a neutral position. If you had prior knowledge of the position the acetabulum is in when it’s in an anteriorly forwardly rotated or oriented state then you know that the position or the placement of the femur that you often see being carried out by testers by using over testing methodology, will result in a limited amount of adduction because of osseous orientation and impingement. So there is a known or assumed cause to a related effect that is objective. It’s a deductive word that is based on theory rather than experiment because of the argument that can be made prior to the experimentation. Again, this is one of my favorite Latin words and it reflects a lot of what I philosophically believe in and allows me to be open minded but yet be philosophically grounded. Our Institute is founded on the way you use knowledge and this word best describes the foundation of PRI.