The desire and inclination to begin from science and data is not a mistake. The world is there to be measured. Experiments can teach us. A table of observations can reveal the error in something we thought was true. Anyone who has had to change a belief because a key measurement did not fit the theory has already learned something this course never denies: things are not made true by our speaking about them.
It is also true that many modern disciplines have grown precise by insisting on precision in how we use words. Chemistry does not advance by eloquence. A lab notebook that does not record observations and measurements in an accurate and controlled way is not yet a record. The arts of language as developed in the classical tradition have no quarrel with that severity. The arts of language are in no sense a way of being loose or accommodating or imprecise. Nor do we use them to change the readings of our instruments, or at least we should not.
Often the student who wants to start from science is reacting to classrooms in which language was treated as decoration while the “real” work was supposed to happen elsewhere, but all the while the instructor and his discipline of study actually practiced a disciplined and careful use of language and definition. The modern student of science may well be concerned not to allow language or the arts of language to introduce laxity and vagueness into his work. Data are ultimately a norm against which we check theories and our words. Being severe here is a virtue.
What is true, then, is this: evidence can correct speech. What has not yet been shown is that evidence can replace speech, or that a student can be formed in a science without first being formed in the words by which that science is taught, recorded, and handed on. We have only to say this to realize that it is impossible: we need words as much for teaching science as for anything else.
It is worth noting that teachers of the sciences, as we said, do often attend to words and precise language, but the problem is that they do not do it in a consistent and self-aware way. The physicist has certain habits of speaking; he has learned them, as well he should; but he has not studied them or evaluated them. The arts of language do precisely that, and their goal is to help us fix our meanings and understand better how our words relate to the things in the world that we use our words to describe.