 For Reinhold, critique of language consists in rectifying the ambiguities of language, an enterprise Reinhold calls “synonymic.” The “primary task” of this critique, and of “philosophy as science” more generally, is to define the “fundamental concepts of human cognition” (Grundlegung einer Synonymik, p. 185). There is a general consensus in the literature that synonymic promises more than it can deliver (Cloeren 1972; Cloeren 1988; Gerten 2006; Imhof 2015; Valenza 2003). One problem concerns the justification of the definitions Reinhold proposes and their hierarchical ordering: at times, these seem little more than arbitrarily stipulated. Another problem concerns the ontological underpinning of Reinhold’s system. In particular, he appeals to the rational realist notion of the unity of thought and being (on the prefiguration of Reinhold’s linguistic phase in his early correspondence with Bardili, see Valenza 2004). Thus, in addition to human, representational thought—which is inextricably tied up with language—Reinhold presupposes speechless thinking (sprachloses Denken), identified with God’s thinking. This non-representational thinking, which Reinhold variously calls “thinking in the narrowest sense” (Grundlegung einer Synonymik, p. 116) and—harking back to rational realism—“thinking qua thinking,” is to be understood as the “immutable, subordinating order of being in itself” (Das menschliche Erkenntniß, p. 57). Especially in Das menschliche Erkenntniß, Reinhold emphasizes the indispensable relationship between representational thought and language in order to distinguish the former from divine thinking qua thinking. However, it is unclear whether this ontological foundation, which draws on rational realism, is properly accounted for within the framework of Reinhold’s philosophy of language.