 It is for this reason that identity theorists sometimes insist that their position should not be defined in terms of an identity between truth-bearer and truth-maker: that way of expressing the theory looks too much in thrall to correspondence theorists’ talk (cf. Candlish 1999b: 200–1, 213). For the identity theorist, to speak of both truth-makers and truth-bearers would imply that the things allegedly doing the truth-making were distinct from the things that were made true. But, since in the identity theorist’s view there are no truth-makers distinct from truth-bearers, if the latter are conceived as propositions, and since nothing can make itself true, it follows that there are no truth-makers simpliciter, only truth-bearers. It seems to follow, too, that it would be ill-advised to attack the identity theory by pointing out that some (or all) truths lack truth-makers (so Merricks 2007: 181): so long as truths are taken to be propositions, that is exactly what identity theorists themselves say. From the identity theorist’s point of view, truth-maker theory looks very much like an exercise in splitting the level of reference in half and then finding a bogus match between the two halves (see McDowell 1998: 137 n. 21; Gaskin 2006: 203; 2008: 119–27). For example, when David Armstrong remarks that 