  If an allegedly inaccurate name like ‘Hermogenes’ fails to name at all, to call the person in question ‘Hermogenes’ is not even to say something false, according to Cratylus, but simply to fail to say anything. In this way Cratylus turns out to belong to that school of sophistic thinkers who paradoxically deny that false statement is possible (see the entry on    method and metaphysics in Plato’s Sophist and Statesman).