It's interesting. At my ridiculous college the first semester "Laboratory" was about measurement. We actually tried to MAKE plane surfaces, straight edges, scales, primitive logorhythmic slide rules, and at least to understand a device with which we could compute the speed of light and such like. It was there that the conversation arose. But, yeah, we were all a bunch of philosophes wanna-bes.
And I htink the virtue of The Trivium - the "three ways" of grammar logic, and rhetoric, is that they address directly this problem.
So after all this study I managed to become completely incomprehensible! Who says collitch is a waste of time?