Even so, the scientist does not live in the experiment. The scientist lives in reports, definitions, hypotheses, lab talk, papers, and teaching. A measurement that cannot be named or described cannot be communicated. A law that cannot be stated cannot be tested by anyone else.
Consider what actually happens after a result. Someone must say what was counted, in what units, under what definition of the thing counted. “Significant,” “control,” “error,” “cause,” “species,” “energy” — each of these can be used as a tool, but the point is that these are tools presumed by the work of science. The student who treats words as secondary will still use them, since he has no choice; and he may well find that he has sometimes used them without noticing when they have stopped meaning what he assumes they mean or, even worse, when he has lost the precise sense of what they do or should mean in a given context.
A graph can be made to argue without saying that it is arguing, because of what the graph implies and how it is used. A table can hide a definition in an implicit assumption that few notice and about which no one raises questions. A method that cannot be written down so that another person can follow it is not yet a method of empirical science.
The cost of treating words as secondary is not that science fails to produce data or theories. It is that the student cannot say what precisely the result was, cannot tell one kind of definition from another, e.g. he cannot tell a descriptive definition from an essential definition, and he cannot see as easily when a picture has been asked to do the work of an argument.
Without the art of speech, any scientific method becomes a private skill, like that of the practitioner who is skilled but does not know the reasons why things are the way they are. Science, which has to be taught and checked by others, is by nature something more than just a skill or knack for figuring out a quantitative test or measure.