The desire and inclination to begin from science and data is not a mistake. The world is there to be measured, experiments can teach us, and a table of observations can reveal the error in something we thought was true. The classical tradition would never wish to deny that we begin from things in an ultimate sense; and things do not become true or false or real or unreal because of how we speak about them. In some ways, this was the first great error that Socrates and Plato desired to refute.
It is also true that many modern disciplines have grown precise by insisting on precision in how we use words. Chemistry does not advance by eloquence, and a lab notebook that does not record observations and measurements in an accurate and controlled way is not yet a record. The arts of language (more properly, the arts of speech), as developed in the classical tradition, have no problem with even the strictest standards; they are in no sense a way of being loose or accommodating or imprecise.
Often the student who wants to start from science is reacting to classrooms in which language was treated as decoration while the “real” work was supposed to happen elsewhere, even though all the while the instructor and his discipline actually practiced a disciplined and careful use of language and definition. The modern student of science may well be concerned not to allow language or the arts of language to introduce laxity and vagueness into his work.
What is true, then, is this: the evidence of our senses and experiments can correct the words and concepts we use. What has not yet been shown is that this kind of evidence can replace speech, or that a student can be formed in a science without first being formed in the words by which that science is taught. We have only to state this to see that it is impossible, since we need words as much for teaching science as for anything else.
It is worth noting that teachers of the sciences, as we said, do often attend to words and precise language; the problem is that they do not necessarily do so in a consistent and self-aware way. The physicist has certain habits of speaking, and he has learned them, as well he should; but he has not studied or evaluated them, and that is not his task either; it is the task of the arts and sciences of speech. A central goal of the arts of language is to help us fix our meanings and understand better how our words relate to the things in the world that we use them to describe.