The lack of authentic ancient texts is usually regarded as the main difficulty in studies of pre-Socratic philosophers. However, the extant fragments also pose a problem based on the specific tradition that chose and selected them for preservation. Aristotle and his commentators embedded these fragments within their general framework of the history of early philosophy, so that even the most basic and accepted «facts» about the pre-Socratics cannot be considered independent of later interpretations. This article provides a textological analysis of fragments ascribed to Empedocles and used by the school of Aristotle to illustrate what was, from its perspective, the central concept of the «four elements.» A comparison between the peripatetic concept «stocheion» (elements) and Empedocles' symbolic term «roots» reveals not only semantic differences between them, but their functional relationship with different systems of logic, particularly the contrast between universal and personalized notions. Unlike a precise concept, pointing towards a particular object, the word-symbol denotes a uniform cosmic process that determines the dynamic structure of the entire Universe and its individual parts. The analysis of fragments that list «elements» demonstrates inherent reasons why the system of Empedocles lacked a uniform «technical» vocabulary for their description. Originally, they referred to different qualitatively-spatial layers in the structure of the Universe, and only in the later tradition were they adopted to illustrate the concept of the «four elements.» The study of the language, poetics, and logic of the early philosophers extends the application of philological methods to pre-Socratic texts and allows a solution to some special problems of scholarly interpretation, sometimes to the point of changing the very meaning of the analyzed concept.