  The problem with Ryle’s account is its reliance on vague and unclarified talk of “aboutness.” If we had a precise philosophical account of what it is for a statement to be about a particular object or subject matter, then we could define a topic-neutral statement as one that is not about anything—or, perhaps, one that is about everything indifferently. Here we might hope to appeal to Nelson Goodman’s classic account of “absolute aboutness,” which implies that logical truths are not absolutely about anything (1961, 256), or to David Lewis’s (1988) account of what it is for a proposition to be about a certain subject matter, which implies that logical truths are about every subject matter indifferently. However, neither account is appropriate for our purpose. On Goodman’s account, “what a statement is absolutely about will depend in part upon what logic is presupposed,” and hence upon which expressions are taken to be logical constants (253–4), so it would be circular to appeal to Goodman’s account of aboutness in a demarcation of the logical constants. On Lewis’s account, all necessarily true propositions turn out to be topic-neutral. But if there is any point to invoking topic neutrality in demarcating logic, it is presumably to distinguish the logical truths from a wider class of necessary propositions, some of which are subject matter-specific. If we are willing to broaden the bounds of logic to encompass all necessary propositions (or, alternatively, all analytic sentences), then we might as well demarcate logic as the realm of necessary truth (alternatively, analytic truth). It is only if we want to distinguish the logical from the generically necessary, or to demarcate logic without appealing to modal notions at all, that we need to invoke topic neutrality. And in neither of these cases will Lewis’s criterion of aboutness be of service.