Tabulae totius dialectices, aliarum artium instrumenti ...

Ambiguous name to be examined at the beginning.

In how many ways each thing is said, Aristotle teaches in book 1 of the Topics, chapters xii and xiii.

Argumentation is the scope of all.

It is the proper task of Dialectics to teach and to explain in order, either by exposition or by argumentation.

Dialectics is the common instrument of all philosophy, for judging the true and the false.

The duties of Dialectics, especially the critical.

The elements of definition and division are the categorical words, i.e., the appellations and orders of things.

And one will be able to use the explanation of these questions. Ambiguity of a name is to be guarded against most especially: which, if it happens by chance, we shall indicate at the beginning of the dispute by enumerating the significations, which force and meaning is subject to the name. Simple themes are treated by two instruments most especially: definition and division: but composite [themes], by one argumentation, for whose sake all the precepts have been prepared. In these three parts the proper duty of Dialectics is completed, which is to teach, or to discourse diligently; concerning which Cicero writes in book 5 of the Tusculan Disputations thus: The third (Dialectics) follows, which flows and spreads through all parts of wisdom: by which it defines a thing, divides genera, adds consequences, concludes what is perfect, and judges the true and the false by the method and science of discourse. And in the Brutus: Unless he had besides learned the art which teaches how to distribute the whole thing into parts, to explain what is latent by defining, to clarify the obscure by interpreting, to see ambiguous things first, then to distinguish them, finally to have a rule by which the true and false might be judged, and which things, being proposed, were and were not consequences. From which words these principal duties of Dialectics are understood: to define the obscure, to divide the universal, to confirm the true and refute the false by arguments or proofs (which the Topic teaches how to find). Definition and division cannot be explained unless the degrees and categories of simple words are known, of which the former denote the appellations of things, the latter their classes and orders, which are the elements of both instruments: which the more recent [authors] call predicables.