Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Reid

Reid is doing something quietly subversive: he’s giving philosophers permission to mistrust grammar. The line starts with a polite concession - yes, of course a philosopher may examine “those distinctions” baked into “the structure of all languages.” Then comes the twist: if a distinction is universal in speech, that doesn’t make it sacred; it may be “imputed to a vulgar error.” Universality, for Reid, is not a credential. It’s a red flag.

The intent is polemical, aimed at a powerful 18th-century habit: treating the categories encoded in words as if they were the categories of reality. If every language marks, say, subject and predicate, or speaks as if “mind” and “body” are separate kinds of things, a certain kind of metaphysician is tempted to call that nature’s blueprint. Reid calls that temptation what it is: philosophy laundering common talk into ontology.

The subtext is also anti-elitist in an interesting way. “Vulgar” doesn’t mean stupid people; it means the inherited, crowd-level assumptions smuggled in by idiom, metaphor, and convenience. Reid’s warning is that philosophers, who like to imagine themselves above the marketplace, are especially prone to being ventriloquized by it.

Context matters: Reid is a central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment “common sense” tradition, pushing back against skeptical and overly abstract systems (think Hume’s shadow, and the rationalist taste for airy distinctions). He’s not rejecting ordinary language; he’s insisting we can’t let language do our thinking for us. Philosophy’s job, in his view, is to audit the defaults.