  The closing topic to which Socrates and Cratylus turn is where knowledge is to come from. Cratylus, despite the damage Socrates has inflicted on his extreme naturalism, still clings to his belief that the study of things’ names is the privileged route to knowledge of the things themselves. But why, Socrates wants to know, should we assume that the original name-givers were infallibly right in the descriptions they encoded? Cratylus, who is emerging as an adherent of the flux theory, points to the consistent emphasis on flux revealed throughout the foregoing etymologies. To this Socrates retorts that (a) one can be self-consistently wrong, as well as right, and (b) other etymologies can be found that show up the original name-makers as not quite so consistently wedded to flux after all.