You have been misunderstood. You said one thing; someone heard another; and the work you were doing together stopped until the words were repaired. No method, no data set, and no good intention prevented that stop. The stop was in the saying.
You have tried to teach a child a name. The child already saw the bird. What the child did not yet have was a way to call for it, ask about it, tell it from a bat, or thank someone for pointing it out. The lesson was not the transfer of a bird. It was the gift of a word that would let the child live with the bird in a common world.
You have argued and watched the argument turn on a word no one would define. Two people were not yet disagreeing about a thing. They were using one sound for two things, or two sounds for one, and calling the noise a debate. Until the name was shared, there was nothing yet to be for or against.
You have read a law, and found that what you may do, what you must do, and what will be done to you stand or fall with what the sentence says. You have made a promise, and found that the future between two people was changed by words spoken, not by a private intention that never became public. You have prayed, and found that the act was an act of speech: address, petition, thanks, confession — or it was not yet prayer.
Those experiences are not illustrations added after a theory. They are the place the theory has to start. A community of learners cannot securely care for methods or systems until it can care for names, statements, and speeches. You have already seen this when a lesson failed because a word was not shared. The later sciences, the later arts, even the later piety of a tradition, all arrive in speech or they do not arrive in common at all.
This lesson does not claim that we first possess a private stock of thoughts which we later clothe. It claims something you have already undergone: that teaching, promising, arguing, and praying are linguistic acts, and that a community that cannot tend those acts cannot tend the rest of its work. How word, concept, and thing actually stand to one another is a real question, and it is answered two pages on.
The picture of a private stock of thoughts later clothed in words is not this course’s account and is not assumed anywhere in it. The account it does hold is given in How a word reaches a thing.
The next page asks what language is for — not first as a school subject, but as the thing you were already using in every case above.
Continue to What language is for.