topic-neutral noncommittal between two or more ontological interpretations of a term. J. J. C. Smart (in 1959) suggested that introspective reports can be taken as topic-neutral: composed of terms neutral between ‘dualistic metaphysics’ and ‘materialistic metaphysics.’ When one asserts, e.g., that one has a yellowish-orange afterimage, this is tantamount to saying ‘There is something going on that is like what is going on when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front of me, i.e., when I really see an orange’. The italicized phrase is, in Smart’s terms, topic-neutral; it refers to an event, while remaining noncommittal about whether it is material or immaterial. The term has not always been restricted to neutrality regarding dualism and materialism. Smart suggests that topic-neutral descriptions are composed of ‘quasi-logical’ words, and hence would be suitable for any occasion where a relatively noncommittal expression of a view is required. See also PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. D.C.D. topics, the analysis of common strategies of argumentation, later a genre of literature analyzing syllogistic reasoning. Aristotle considered the analysis of types of argument, or ‘topics,’ the best means of describing the art of dialectical reasoning; he also used the term to refer to the principle underlying the strategy’s production of an argument. Later classical commentators on Aristotle, particularly Latin rhetoricians like Cicero, developed Aristotle’s discussions of the theory of dialectical reasoning into a philosophical form. Boethius’s work on topics exemplifies the later classical expansion of the scope of topics literature. For him, a topic is either a self-evidently true universal generalization, also called a ‘maximal proposition,’ or a differentia, a member of the set of a maximal proposition’s characteristics that determine its genus and species. Man is a rational animal is a maximal proposition, and like from genus, the differentia that characterizes the maximal proposition as concerning genera, it is a topic. Because he believed dialectical reasoning leads to categorical, not conditional, conclusions, Boethius felt that the discovery of an argument entailed discovering a middle term uniting the two, previously unjoined terms of the conclusion. Differentiae are the genera of these middle terms, and one constructs arguments by choosing differentiae, thereby determining the middle term leading to the conclusion. In the eleventh century, Boethius’s logical structure of maximal propositions and differentiae was used to study hypothetical syllogisms, while twelfth-century theorists like Abelard extended the applicability of topics structure to the categorical syllogism. By the thirteenth century, Peter of Spain, Robert Kilwardby, and Boethius of Dacia applied topics structure exclusively to the categorical syllogism, principally those with non-necessary, probable premises. Within a century, discussion of topics structure to evaluate syllogistic reasoning was subsumed by consequences literature, which described implication, entailment, and inference relations between propositions. While the theory of consequences as an approach to understanding relations between propositions is grounded in Boethian, and perhaps Stoic, logic, it became prominent only in the later thirteenth century with Burley’s recognition of the logical significance of propositional logic. See also ABELARD , ARISTOTLE , BOETHIUS , BURLEY, CICERO , KILWARDBY, PETER OF SPAIN , SYLLOGIS. S.E.L.