If teaching and learning are at root linguistic, then the student who studies empirical science still needs the arts that are concerned with names, meanings, definitions, statements, and speeches. That takes nothing away from the power of modern science; it is an account of part of what that power relies on and is implicitly built upon.
Grammar, here, is the art of speaking and writing correctly, including the interpretation of the great authors; it makes our acts of stating, describing, and defining correct and therefore understandable by others, and its matter is significant speech. Logic directs the acts of reason (terms, propositions, and arguments) toward truth, so that our reasoning from one thing to another is well ordered and clear, and either genuinely proves our conclusions or at least makes clear whether we are only offering suggestions or laying out something probable. Rhetoric is ordered to persuasion and truth, especially since the true and the just are by nature more powerful than their opposites (cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric I.1), and so it makes us able to teach the truth well, whether students or colleagues, and persuade those who are ready to receive it.
Nothing from these arts compromises or undermines science as such. The fact is that science cannot be built without a foundation in words, concepts, and how they relate to things. But through language and what can be built from language, science is not only possible but can reach even greater heights.
For the arts of language to be first means, as we said above, that these arts are arts on which everything else depends and arts through which every other discipline is able to achieve its aim of articulating and teaching the truth about the world. It also means that these arts are better learned before others, since they lay the foundations of the others and are required for them, and, likewise, they contribute to the student’s wider life and capacities beyond even just his higher studies. This does not mean that grammar, logic, and rhetoric are somehow the greatest and best of all disciplines; arguably, the study of nature is far deeper and more powerful. But the study of nature cannot achieve its end without careful language, logical reasoning, and well-formulated and persuasive articulations.
In this preface to our course of study, we state the foundations of the arts of language (words, things, and concepts) and we can take up this account again later on in detail in the interactive courses.
Now that we have seen why science is not our first or best beginning for higher studies, we can go back either to consider other possibilities, like that mathematics might be the best foundation, or we can go on to the account of the classical tradition that it is words and the arts of speech that give foundation to everything else we come to know.
Continue to Why the Classical Tradition Begins with Words.
Or go back to Where to Begin for Higher Studies in General to explore another starting point.