 Dignāga’s approach in the fifth chapter of Pramāṇasamuccaya is indeed top-down in that he relies upon the descriptive content of the apoha to pick out the appropriate particulars. And top-down is also how the “exclusion theory” (apohavāda) is presented in the works of non-Buddhist opponents of Dignāga, as well as in modern works treating of the subject. Bimal K. Matilal interpreted the theory in this fashion (see Matilal 1971, 41), as did Hans Herzberger. Herzberger (1975), developed an ingenious logical strategy, using some possibilities offered by Emil Post’s theory of twofold propositions, to come up with what he termed a “resourceful nominalism,” one that would explain how predicates applied non-arbitrarily to individual things, that would account for our naïve semantic intuitions, and that would nonetheless avoid ontological commitment to universals. Every proposition would be analyzable as an ordered pair of content and commitment—“apohist double negation” would affirm content but deny ontological commitment. In what seems to be at least partially a top-down approach, Mark Siderits has taken the relevant double negation as involving two different types of negation, choice and exclusion, so that it is the combination of the two that picks out a class of individuals, all the while staying nominalistically unengaged to universals (Siderits 1995; 2005). Finally, perhaps the most striking modern use of a comparable double negation—i.e., difference from others— is the view in the Cours de linguistique générale of Ferdinand de Saussure that word-types and phonemes are only characterized by their differences from other ones in a system, although this 19th–20th century Swiss structuralist was neither aware of possible 6th century parallels in Indian philosophy nor motivated primarily by nominalist ontological worries (see D’Ottavi 2010).