Truth is either found or made. Philosophy has never fully settled which.
Everyone uses the word “true” fluently, and disagrees, often without noticing, about what makes something true in the first place.
Correspondence theory, traced to Aristotle and formalised by Aquinas as “truth is the equation of thing and intellect,” treats truth as a relationship between a belief and an independently existing fact. This is the “discovered” model: truth is out there, waiting to be tracked. Coherence theory, associated with Harold Joachim and F.H. Bradley, denies that truth is a relation to the world at all and instead makes it a relation between beliefs, a belief is true if it fits inside a consistent, mutually supporting system. Pragmatist theory, from Peirce and James, ties truth to what survives sustained, well-conducted inquiry rather than to a static mirror of reality.
A fourth family, social-constructivist and discursive accounts, treats what counts as true as something produced by social, cultural, or power-laden frameworks rather than discovered independent of them. Michel Foucault’s “regime of truth” describes historically specific systems in which truth and power are generated together, not one grounding the other from outside. Richard Rorty pushed pragmatism further still, rejecting the idea that a true belief mirrors a mind-independent reality at all. Critics argue this collapses truth into whatever a given framework finds useful to assert, answerable to no standard outside itself, which is exactly the fault line a claim like “truth is revealed, not constructed” is taking a side on.
Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Truth” and “The Correspondence Theory of Truth.”