ABSTRACT
Experience in society takes on meaning only when the "precarious, novel, irregular" and the "settled, assured, and uniform" are brought together in union. John Dewey's great contribution to a theory of communication is that he makes the experience of art central to his theory of society. As American pragmatists who followed William James discovered, symbolic analysis could not be related to social analysis, until some theory of the act and the function of symbols in the act was developed. James, Dewey, and George Herbert Mead soon found that they could not make clear what they meant by symbolic expression as a problem-solving process until they made clear how and why they differed from the super-naturalists in theology and the naturalists in biology, as well as mechanists in science who confused scientific knowledge with mathematical knowledge. "Nature, Communication, and Meaning" is probably Dewey's definitive discussion on communication.
