This course does not ask you to treat words as more real than things. It asks you to notice that our common hold on things, in teaching and in inquiry, is through significant speech. To postpone the arts of language until “after we have the things” is to postpone the only means by which a community of learners can have the things together.
The cost of the sticker theory is not that objects vanish. It is that we cannot tell whether we are talking about the same object, cannot correct a bad name, and cannot teach. “Just semantics” then becomes a way of refusing the very disagreement that would have shown us the thing more clearly.
A disciplined art of language is the answer to that cost, not a rival of the world. Grammar cares for how a name and a sentence are composed so that something can be said of what is there. Logic cares for whether what is said follows. Rhetoric cares for whether a hearer is actually shown the thing, and not merely waved at it.
The next lesson begins from ordinary experiences of naming, misunderstanding, promising, and teaching a child a word. It will not open by citing an authority. The authorities, when they appear, will be asked to name what you have already undergone. Stay with it as far as What kind of sign a word is: that is where your objection gets its answer, and the answer concedes more to you than you may expect. The sound really is arbitrary. Nothing else in the order is.
Continue to Why we begin with words.