 More importantly, there are several passages where Socrates discusses falsehood in belief and speech at length, as a familiar and important problem in need of resolution. In the Cratylus, Socrates says that a great many people, both in the past and in the present, have held that it is impossible to speak falsely, on the grounds that it is impossible to say something without saying something that is; Cratylus concludes that in such cases, instead of speaking falsely and saying something that is not, the speaker would simply be making noise, no more meaningful than banging a pot (429d–430a). A similar puzzle about false speech is posed in the Euthydemus, initially by the brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, a visiting tag team of Sophists who are displaying their eristic prowess (283e–284e). It is later reprised by Socrates, who attributes it explicitly to “Protagoras’ followers” and still earlier thinkers, and it is explicitly extended to false belief as well (286c–d). These versions of the puzzle frame it in terms of whether one can speak (or think) of “what is not”: one cannot speak without there being something that one is saying (or thinking); yet it is impossible for there to be such a thing and for it not to be. But that is what speaking falsely would amount to, since on this view speaking falsely just is to say something that is not. Plato never explicitly questions the relational character of speaking and believing or rejects the requirement that the relata must exist or obtain. In the inconsistent triad we considered above, it is the third proposition, “Sometimes we can think about what does not exist/obtain,” which is consistently under pressure in these contexts. At the same time, Socrates objects that such a position would be self-undermining (Euthyd. 287e–288a), though he does not offer a further diagnosis here.