If teaching and learning are already linguistic, then the student who studies empirical science still needs the arts that care for names, meanings, definitions, statements, and speeches. That is not a slight on the power of modern science. It is an account of part of what that power relies on and is implicitly built upon.
Grammar, here, makes our acts of stating or describing or defining correct and therefore understandable in the easiest and most error-free ways by others. We need to be careful and nuanced and right about what the terms are doing, about whether a sentence is even complete, or whether a complex expression like a paragraph says what we think it says. Logic makes our reasoning from one thing to another be well ordered and clear and genuinely able to prove our conclusions or at least be clear about whether we are only offering suggestions or laying out something probable. Rhetoric makes our efforts to teach either students or other colleagues in the discipline something that does in fact present the truth well and persuade those who are disposed well.
None of this hinders or even delays science. It is what a science already does whenever it is done in the best way. Science cannot be built without a foundation in words, concepts, and how they relate to things.
The next section states that foundation directly, from ordinary experiences of naming, misunderstanding, promising, and teaching a child a word. You can return here later. It has been successful if you now see why “begin from data” still leaves a first work undone.
Continue to Why we begin with words.