You have already felt the mind move. You follow a recipe from flour to dough. You follow a story from a name to a deed. You follow an explanation from what you knew to what you did not. That movement — from one consideration to another, for the sake of understanding — is what this course, following Kearns, calls discourse. It is not a special academic activity. It is the ordinary work of a human mind when it is trying to understand.
Discourse is the movement of the mind from one consideration to another for the sake of understanding something. The most general and powerful instrument for discourse is the expression of thought in language, in sentences and words.
If language is that instrument, then to get better at discourse we must know how to use language well, and to use an instrument well we must understand it. The words we use about a thing are not an afterthought to inquiry. They are how the inquiry is carried, checked, and handed on. The study of discourse in general must therefore begin by studying language itself.
Kearns notes that we examine our words in two directions at once: whether they adequately express what we are thinking, and whether they are adequate to the things we are thinking about. Both questions are already in the experiences of the first page — the failed lesson, the undefined word in a quarrel, the law that will not yield. Notice what the pair of examinations implies. If a word can be measured against a thought and against a thing, then a word, a thought, and a thing are three, not two. The next page takes up how the three stand.
We examine our words directly in two ways: first, we examine our words as to their correctness and adequacy for expressing what we are thinking; and, second, we examine our words as to how adequate they are to the things we are thinking about.
The second of those two examinations — adequacy to things — is where Chapter 2 of Principles of Discourse was to go, and that chapter is unfinished. Rather than guess at it, the three pages that follow answer the question from the standard sources: Aristotle’s On Interpretation with Aquinas’s commentary, Porphyry, and three modern teachers of the same material — Walshe, Andres, Houser, and Maritain. Where those sources leave something open, it is marked as open.
The classical name for the arts that tend this instrument is the trivium. Kearns’s book treats language, then logic, then persuasion, in that order.
In the classical and medieval world, the study of these three, language, logic, and persuasion, were the trivium, and they laid out for students the foundations of how we come to express ourselves, to show that something is true, and to persuade others of that truth, foundations on which all other disciplines are built.
This course uses the school names. Grammar concerns what is said and how speech is composed. Logic concerns how statements follow. Rhetoric concerns how speech moves a hearer toward assent. The pages that follow take them one by one. They are short maps, then practice in the matching application. They are not a substitute for the arts themselves.
The default next step is grammar. Logic works on statements, and a statement is made of words. Rhetoric offers speech to a hearer, and there is no speech yet if nothing has been said. If you cannot tell a statement from a question or a command, you may look at the opening of logic sooner; that case is rare, and the grammar pages will say so. For everyone else, the first art is the care of significant speech.
Before the arts themselves, one more foundation. The three arts all handle words. It is worth knowing what a word is doing when it reaches a thing.
Continue to Words, concepts, and things.