But (8) is clearly false. The reason is that the ‘because’ in (6) and (8) is a causal or explanatory relation, and plausibly such relations must obtain between distinct relata. But the relata in (8) are (obviously) not distinct. Hence, (8) is false, and this means that the conjunction of (6) and (7) must be false, and that deflationism is inconsistent with the correspondence intuition. To borrow a phrase of Mark Johnston’s (1989) – who mounts a similar argument in a different context – we might