  The second approach locates the topic neutrality of logic in its universal applicability. On this conception, logic is useful for the guidance and criticism of reasoning about any subject whatsoever—natural or artefactual, animate or inanimate, abstract or concrete, normative or descriptive, sensible or merely conceptual—because it is intimately connected somehow with the very conditions for thought or reasoning. This notion of topic neutrality is not equivalent to the one just discussed. It allows that a science with its own proprietary domain of objects, like arithmetic or set theory, might still count as topic-neutral in virtue of its completely general applicability. Thus, Frege, who took arithmetic to be about numbers, which he regarded as genuine objects, could still affirm its absolute topic neutrality: