Burke’s analogy of the “great central moltenness” (GM xix) out of which distinctions arise brings into light his idea of the function of rhetoric as the use of words to form attitudes or to induce actions. According to Burke, we are moved to action through language, through a dialectical exchange of symbols and through our desire for identification. The scope of the pentad is not merely the naming of elements (symbols) but the analysis of the interplay between the pentadic elements, or of the ratios, which may point us to places of ambiguity. In order to analyze the interplay, we seek vocabularies that “reflect reality faithfully”; however, by selecting certain words we implicitly deflect reality (GM 59). Viewed in this light, the term “moltenness” may suggest that our selections gain a signified when we utilize them, when we congeal them on the surface; otherwise, symbols, ratios, and vocabularies represent an undistinguishable mass of words: “all the elements are fused into one togetherness” (GM xix). Because we “continually perform new acts” making new judgments about the scope of the context in our interpretations, by selecting terms we select a circumference (GM 90). Burke maintains that every circumference is “a reduction” (GM 96): when we select from the central moltenness we leave out (that is, we reduce). (This is part of how historians make individuations of the past, according to F. R. Ankersmit.) The metaphor Burke utilizes is a very powerful one, as it suggests that words which we do not employ or which we throw back into the central moltedness would be purified by the heat before we utilize them again and thus we offer them a new signified.