 We should register C.B. Martin’s doubt that this is throwing out the baby with the bath water (1996: 59). According to Martin, we already recognise in ordinary discourse that different negative truths have different truth-makers—not just one as Armstrong proposes. For example, we recognise that what makes it true that there is no oil in this engine is different from what makes it true that there are no dodos left. What makes claims like these true are absences, lacks, limits, holes and voids, where these are conceived not as things but as “localised states of the world”, robustly first-order and “causally relevant” to what goes on (Martin 1996: 58, 65–6; Taylor 1952: 443–5). But, as many philosophers have argued, when we talk about an absence having causal effects what we’re really saying can be understood without reifying negative states and appealing instead to the actual effects, or the counterfactual effects, of a positive state (Molnar 2000: 77–80; Armstrong 2004: 64–7; Lewis 2004; Beebee 2004). 