All learning and all speculation and every human practice begin from the words we use and what they mean and how we use them. A community of learners cannot even consider methodology, principles, or an approach to a set of questions before it has a common language and a common way of understanding language, meaning, and truth, at least implicitly. The higher disciplines, the more elaborate arts, and even new discoveries all come about within the broad order of speech, words, meaning, and truth.
This is also confirmed historically: in every major classical culture, from China and India to the Ancient Near East and Classical Greece, among the first disciplines to be discovered and articulated, and among the disciplines that guide the others, were disciplines based on language, meaning, and truth, that is, on names and terms, on sentences and texts.
In insisting that the best way to begin is with words, the classical tradition of the trivium does not treat our private thoughts as things that exist without language and that we later merely express in words as we like. Rather, the trivium begins from the fact that teaching, learning, promising, arguing, giving judgment, and articulating our thoughts in general are all necessary foundations for any higher study or cooperative effort.
As we said on the previous page, the arts of language are first in two senses, and the second, being first in the order of learning, does not follow merely from the fact that every discipline uses words. It rests on a further point, which Aristotle makes about method (Metaphysics II.3): it is absurd to seek at the same time knowledge and the way of attaining knowledge, so one must already be trained in how arguments are to be taken. Aquinas applies this to logic, which must come first in learning, not because it is easier than the other sciences, but because the other sciences depend on it, since it teaches the method of proceeding in all of them. Grammar and logic are first in learning, then, not because they are the highest studies but because they are the tools that all the rest employ.
It is true that the classical tradition is not monolithic and many authors had different views and criticized each other over the centuries, for example, the Renaissance humanists who criticized the Aristotelian scholastics. So, in that sense, there is not one classical western tradition that stands as the single united tradition. The outline here is not based primarily on the historical accounts of what thinkers argued for what but rather on the order of the disciplines themselves and what have emerged as the best answers over time to the central questions.
How words, concepts, and things actually relate to one another is the central question, but it is not the first question in an introduction. The first question is this: What is the purpose or goal of language? Is there more than one?
Sources: Aristotle, Metaphysics II.3 (995a12–13); Aquinas, In Metaphysicam II, lect. 5, and In Boethii De Trinitate q. 6, a. 1, ad 3.
Continue to The Purposes of Language.