Names, not surprisingly, are a special case of words, and the relation between most human signs and their referents is not the simple relation of indication. In fact, most human signs are extremely complex, and this is the main reason we are so much more intelligent than other great apes. Our language, like our brains, is so complex that we indeed seem just "a little lower than the Angels".⁷ Our words, in fact, refer not only to entities or things (as signs do), they also refer to other words; and they not only refer to things and words, but they also mean things and words. In other words, words not only indicate, they symbolize; and that makes all the difference.

This complex relationship between words, as symbols, and everything else in the Universe is called the symbolic relation or symbolic reference. And the depth of a symbol's reference/meaning is precisely what gives this kind of model its particular utility. Human language helps us model the world; and does so in large part by a "thick" network of word-meanings. Unfortunately, as it turns out, "the world" itself is but a type of model, a construct, resulting form our brain's attempt to survive by using of the ontic information fed through the senses. When this incoming data becomes our neural networks, then onticity becomes cognicity. But language is such a large part of our information processing that our cognicity will naturally become increasingly linguistic, and there's the rub. For in the symploce of the older and newer models that enform our consciousness, language ends up as a formative element in the construction of the Reality that it (our language) meant merely to describe and relate. The model, then, is muddling the modeling.

Now, as I said earlier, all knowing is modeling. But if we are not aware that we are modeling, we may impute to the model more than is its due; a fact useful to Rhetoric. Persuading the audience that a model is actually the case is tantamount to making your case, which is precisely why I have taken this approach. What I have really been doing is relating our subject, Rhetoric, to different models: the gardening model, the linguistic model, the cognitive model, and now my own metaphysical model; and by this means I have been attempting to make my case.