The classical tradition, in treating of words first, does not treat words as more real or more important than things. What it holds is that our common grasp of things, in teaching and in inquiry, comes through significant speech, that is, speech that signifies or means something. To postpone the study of the arts of language until “after we have the things” is to postpone the study of the only means by which a community of learners can understand the things. As we shall see, words are the principal instruments of human discourse.
To say that a dispute is “just semantics” can then be a way of refusing to consider what needs to be resolved first. Disputes like this need to be addressed preemptively, so that we can continue to more important and higher questions. The question of the words is important but only in a subordinate way; it is important because our acts of understanding and communicating rely on having our words ordered in the right way.
Here is how the arts of the trivium relate together. Grammar is the art of speaking and writing correctly and of the interpretation of the great authors; its matter is significant speech, by which something can be said about real things. Logic directs the acts of reason (terms, propositions, and arguments) toward truth, and so directs our definitions and divisions and whether what is said follows. Rhetoric is ordered to persuasion and truth, especially since the true and the just are by nature more powerful than their opposites (cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric I.1), and so it attends to showing an audience the thing itself in such a way that they are persuaded of what is true.
In the next section, we consider the foundations of the trivium in more detail. We do not begin by citing an authority like Aristotle, since arguments from authority are the weakest form of proof; the authorities, when they appear, are invoked only to confirm what we have already experienced. The complete answer to our concern here, about the doubtful value of words and the need to begin from things, is given at Words as Signs.
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.