I'm not really into epistemology either; I almost went into it but then decided not to go down the road of "it's not clear whether we can know anything about the world anyway". It's an overdone discussion.
As for your question, I think I'll answer it with another question. What is a truth that exists independent of humanity? The problem with a posteriori truths is that they are inherently based on experience and thus cannot be the answer to that -- as experience is obviously human based we can't therefore say the truths established through a posteriori means (e.g. scientific method, observation) are independent of humanity. On the other hand, a priori truths are fundamentally tied to language, another human creation -- for example, "all triangles have three sides" is completely arbitrary given we defined what constitutes a triangle (as well as what a 'side' is and so on). Geometry is a human thought system and is our way of interpreting the universe. Do triangles exist independent of humans? Well, no; things that we call triangles exist whether or not there are humans to talk about them, but so do an infinite number of other things and we arbritrarily created the category of "triangle", assigned common properties to the objects that exist within it, and excluded a bunch of other objects from that category. As such, the a priori truth that "all triangles have three sides" is a truth that is only relevant to human beings and does not exist in the universe.
|