If teaching and learning are already linguistic, then the student who studies empirical science still needs the arts that care for names, meanings, definitions, statements, and speeches. That is not a slight on the power of modern science; it is an account of part of what that power relies on and is implicitly built upon.
Grammar, here, makes our acts of stating, describing, and defining correct and therefore understandable by others in the easiest and most error-free way. Logic makes our reasoning from one thing to another well ordered and clear, so that it either genuinely proves our conclusions or at least makes clear whether we are only offering suggestions or laying out something probable. Rhetoric makes us able to teach the truth well, whether students or colleagues, and persuade those who are ready to receive it.
None of this hinders or even delays science; it is what a science already does whenever it is done in the best way. Science cannot be built without a foundation in words, concepts, and how they relate to things.
In this prefatory course of study, we state the foundations of the arts of language and we can take up this account again later. 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.