  Do I have any clue as to what the paragraph is about? Well, surely I have some clue. “Because” reveals that the passage is about causal or explanatory relations. “It” reveals that the passage is about at least one object that is not known to be a person. The tense operator “was always” reveals that it is about events that occur in time. “Might be” reveals that it is about the realm of the possible (or the unknown), and not just the actual (or the known). Finally, “every” and “a few” reveal that it is about discrete, countable objects. Perhaps some of these words are not topic-neutral and should not be included in the domain of logic, but we certainly don’t want to rule out all of them. And Ryle’s criterion gives no guidance about where to draw the line. One might even suspect that there is no line, and that topic neutrality is a matter of degree, truth-functional expressions being more topic-neutral than quantifiers, which are more topic-neutral than tense and modal operators, which are more topic-neutral than epistemic expressions, and so on (Lycan 1989).