For Abelard, the problems about words, thoughts and things raised by the Isagoge, the Categories and the opening of the De interpretatione were no more than a prelude to his main task, as a logician, of studying statements linked together into arguments. His treatment of statements, syllogisms and topical argument is one of the richest and most innovative parts of his entire work, but most of it falls outside the bounds of this investigation into the specifically philosophical questions Abelard tackled in the course of his logical work. There is, however, an important exception. Abelard's notion of non-things has already been mentioned in connection with his theory of universals. In the Logica he is careful to point out that neither common conceptions nor status are things at all – they are nothing rather than something. In his treatment of statements and arguments Abelard introduces another sort of non-thing: what statements say – dicta propositionum, as he called them from the Logica onwards. The concept of the dictum is central to Abelard's logical thinking, since it is in terms of their dicta that he analyses the truth of entailment statements. Yet, as the following paragraphs will show, Abelard's discussion of dicta begs rather than answers the ontological question it raises. By indicating very clearly the limits of Abelard's thought about what there is, it also marks the point where the investigation of this aspect of his philosophy must conclude.

The main lines of Abelard's theory of dicta have been well studied and can be described quite briefly. Abelard is brought to talk about dicta principally by his need to explain the basis for the truth of conditionals.