  For Reid the apparent contradiction between strict philosophical truth and common sense (and common experience) is superficial: ‘It arises from this, that philosophers and the vulgar differ in the meaning they put upon what is called the present time, and are thereby led to made a different limit between sense and memory’ (1855: 236). Reid argues that our ordinary talk of ‘seeing’ things move is intelligible, at least on its own terms, because in ordinary life we generally construe the present in a loose and flexible way. If it suits our purposes – and it often does – we allow ‘the present’ to denote a period of time, rather than a durationless moment. (There is no need for the period to be short: we sometimes refer to the present decade or century.) And since temporal intervals can contain change and movement, our ordinary ways of talking are not in the least paradoxical: