An Inquiry into the Nature of Truth

What is truth, and what do we mean when we say a proposition is true? Is truth in any sense dependent, or independent of mind, what is the criteria of truth? These are questions central to the study of truth. Philosophers remain split over the nature of truth, which is one of the most fundamental questions in philosophy. According to the correspondence theory and in light of our gut feelings, we say a belief is true when it corresponds to the way things actually are, when a fact or an event corresponding to it can be established beyond the belief, or generally when the belief corresponds with reality. But there are situations where a belief is evidently true, yet no corresponding factor is present. It is partly these cases where no such reference to the world can be determined, that have led some philosophers to tie truth to mind, a position advocated by coherence proponents who argue that the truth of a belief consists in its coherence with the entire body of our knowledge. In this essay, I aim to survey key problems in these two rival accounts of truth, and argue in favor of the correspondence notion, which draws its appeal from our intuitions and common sense on matters of truth and falsehood.