 But (8) is clearly false. The reason is that the ‘because’ in (6) and (8) is a causal or explanatory relation, and plausibly such relations must obtain between distinct relata. But the relata in (8) are (obviously) not distinct. Hence, (8) is false, and this means that the conjunction of (6) and (7) must be false, and that deflationism is inconsistent with the correspondence intuition. To borrow a phrase of Mark Johnston’s (1989) – who mounts a similar argument in a different context – we might say that if deflationism is true, then what seems to be a perfectly good explanation in (6) goes missing; if deflationism is true, after all, then (6) is equivalent to (8), and (8) is not an explanation of anything.