All learning and all speculation and every human practice begin from the words we use and what they mean and how we use them. A community of learners cannot even consider methodology, principles, or an approach to a set of questions before it has a common language and a common way of understanding language, meaning, and truth, at least implicitly. The higher disciplines, the more elaborate arts, and even new discoveries all come about within the broad order of speech, words, meaning, and truth.
This is also confirmed historically: in every major classical culture, from China and India to the Ancient Near East and Classical Greece, the first disciplines to be discovered and articulated, and the disciplines that guide the others, were all based on language, meaning, and truth, that is, on names and terms, on sentences and texts.
In insisting that the best way to begin is with words, the classical tradition of the trivium does not treat our private thoughts as things that exist without language and that we later merely express in words as we like. Rather, the trivium begins from the fact that teaching, learning, promising, arguing, giving judgment, and articulating our thoughts in general are all necessary foundations for any higher study or cooperative effort.
How words, concepts, and things actually relate to one another is the central question, but it is not the first question in an introduction. The first question is this: What is the purpose or goal of language? Is there more than one?
Continue to The Purposes of Language.