Truth Is Not a Property of Propositions: Why the very bearer of truth has been misidentified for 2,500 years

For more than two millennia, philosophical theories of truth have been divided by a common question: what makes a proposition true? Whether truth is understood as correspondence with facts, coherence within a system of beliefs, pragmatic success, identity with reality, superassertibility, or merely a logical device of disquotation, virtually every major theory shares a deeper and largely unquestioned assumption—that propositions, sentences, beliefs, or statements are the primary bearers of truth. This paper argues that this assumption is mistaken. The central error of truth theory is not the misidentification of the nature of truth, but the misidentification of the entity to which truth is attributed. We contend that truth is not a property, predicate, or status possessed by propositions. Rather, truth is a normative relation obtaining between an inquiry and its successful resolution. Propositions remain indispensable to cognition and discourse, but their role is instrumental rather than truth-bearing. They function as objects, hypotheses, and waypoints within inquiry—structures through which investigation proceeds—not as entities that literally possess truth-values. The paper develops this thesis through three independent lines of argument: cognitive science, Navya-Nyāya logic, and a Fregean context reconstruction. What emerges is an inquiry-centered conception of truth in which truth functions as a norm governing the successful completion of investigation rather than as a property attached to linguistic or mental representations.