Abstract

This dissertation addresses the need for a body of human communication theory that can be useful toward advancing personal and social transformation. Of the humanistic genre, it suggests that there is a need to promote humanism, healing, and personal transformation in the non-clinical settings of everyday living. Three questions guide the effort. First, it asks: what kind of human communication theory might describe some of the underlying dynamics of human interaction, while also suggesting ways to improve the quality of interactions among human beings? Next, it asks: how might the metaphysical abstractions of any related philosophical theory be grounded by some scientific discipline? Then finally, it asks: how might these proposed concepts be captured in a manner that can be useful to human beings in everyday human interaction? ;Extending the work of modern physics to the realm of human communication, the theory integrates conceptual aspects of quantum theory, relativity theory, communication accommodation theory, and various nonverbal communication theory. Then, it proposes the philosophical framework for a new body of theory which it calls the energy-exchange theory of human communication. Treating human beings as living forms of matter, it suggests that "energy" is the life-force that sustains all human beings, and that "consciousness" is that qualitative level of development at which energy manifests itself in the human experience. It proposes that human beings have the capacity to exchange energy and influence consciousness during the human communication process, and that these interactions can advance humanism, healing, and transformation---which it proposes are the higher states and levels of human consciousness. ;Thus, this research effort sought to know and to describe a phenomenon that is the interactive human being; and to suggest useful ways that this volitional being can know and transform itself through human interaction. ;With verisimilitude as a driving factor in describing human beings as communicators, the research is ontology-centered. It suggests that human beings are most notably creatures of feeling and soul, and that it is through interaction involving these dimensions that one can best come to know the human being. Accordingly, the research employs a hermeneutic phenomenological approach toward participative inquiry and experiential knowing. ;With practicality as a driving factor in suggesting ways that the human phenomenon can know and transform itself, this work utilizes a pragmatic approach to theory-building. Pragmatism suggests that all theories are approximations that ultimately should be judged on their abilities to truthfully describe phenomena and to solve human problems. Thus, having undergone an inductive progression from data to theory-building, now this work must go from theory to data, such that next steps should involve formal assessment of its verisimilitude and pragmatism based on feedback gained through field research on various persons who may apply the theory and its model to everyday living