The trivium does not ask you to treat words as more real or important than things. What the trivium insists upon is that our common grasp on things, in teaching and in inquiry, is through something we possess and acquire through significant speech. To postpone our study of the arts of language until “after we have the things” is to postpone our study and mastery of the only means by which a community of learners can understand the things.
If words and names were just labels in the physical sense, then we would not be able to tell whether we are talking about the same object, we would not be able to correct a bad name, and we would be unable to teach. Each word would have its own memory or impression associated with it and that would be all there is to the word. Saying that a dispute is “just semantics” can sometimes then be a way of refusing to consider the thing that needs to be resolved first; and it needs to be resolved first, not because the question of the words is the most important, but because our acts of understanding and communicating rely on having our words ordered in the right way.
A disciplined study of the trivium is the answer to this problem. Grammar directs how a name and a sentence are composed so that something can be said about real things. Logic directs our definitions and divisions and the truth of our statements and whether what is said follows. Rhetoric attends to whether a hearer is actually shown the thing himself in such a way that he is persuaded of what is true.
From here, we move to a more detailed consideration of the foundations of the trivium. Our course begins from ordinary experiences of naming, misunderstanding, promising, and teaching a child a word. It will not open by citing an authority like Aristotle, since arguments from authority are the weakest forms of proof. The authorities, when they appear, will be invoked only to confirm what you have already undergone. What kind of sign a word is: that is where our concern here about the dubious value of words and the need to begin from things gets its complete answer.
Continue to Why we begin with words.