a priori vs specific

a priori

adj
  • Self-evident, intuitively obvious. 

  • Presumed without analysis. 

  • Based on hypothesis and theory rather than experiment or empirical evidence. 

  • Developed entirely from scratch, without deriving it from existing languages. 

adv
  • In a way based on theoretical deduction rather than empirical observation. 

specific

adj
  • explicit or definite. 

  • of a value divided by mass (e.g. specific orbital energy) 

  • similarly referring to a value divided by any measure which acts to standardize it (e.g. thrust specific fuel consumption, referring to fuel consumption divided by thrust) 

  • Serving to identify a particular thing (often a disease or condition), with little risk of mistaking something else for it. 

  • Hyponyms: monospecific, multispecific, oligospecific, paucispecific 

  • intended for, or applying to, a particular thing. 

  • limited to a particular antibody or antigen. 

  • a measure compared with a standard reference value by division, to produce a ratio without unit or dimension (e.g. specific refractive index is a pure number, and is relative to that of air) 

  • pertaining to a species, as a taxon or taxa at the rank of species. 

  • special, distinctive or unique. 

  • being a remedy for a particular disease on a deeper level, rather than just masking the symptoms 

noun
  • The details; particulars. 

  • A remedy for a specific disease or condition. 

  • Specification 

  • A distinguishing attribute or quality. 

How often have the words a priori and specific occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )