 While Reinhold claims in the 1806 Critik that no one doubts thought is conditioned by language, he comes to appreciate that many philosophers hold a contrary, instrumentalist view of the relationship between thought and language (e.g. Fichte, Jakob Friedrich Fries, and Gottlob Ernst Schulze), according to which language merely expresses thought, where thought is independent of language. Reinhold rejects this instrumentalist view of language. In his view, language and thought are mutually conditioning and essentially intertwined (Grundlegung einer Synonymik, p. 3). As a result of this connection, ambiguities and inconsistencies in language carry over to thought. This, Reinhold maintains, explains philosophy’s lack of systematic consistency and the lack of unanimity among philosophers: philosophical disputes are attributable to linguistic ambiguities. Broadly following Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Georg Hamann, Reinhold proposes a critique of language as a meta-critique of reason.