In everyday life, human beings use four sets of symbols with which to generate quasi-stable embodiments of social reality. Iterations of all such embodiments in phase-space taken together has the self-similarity of a strange attractor. All uses of symbols are nonlinear since different stimuli produce the same symbol; the same symbol produces similar but not identical response. The boundaries of all social events are fractal; one cannot discern a sharp, discrete boundary between the social event and its larger environment. The emergence of social structure does not depend upon the behavior of any one member of a set; rather structure is an attribute of a large set of interactive events. The nonlinear character of social dynamics can be observed as between levels of systems organization; symbolic interaction produces mind, self and society, each of which has fractal boundaries and each of which is part of and dependent upon the other levels of system functioning. Qualitative social change arises from bifurcations in the dynamics of social life. For any given population of persons, groups or societies, given the same initial conditions, one may expect a basin of outcomes with qualitatively different regions with fractal boundaries between regions. The ontologies created by symbol using humans takes the form of a soliton, a coherent and connected dynamical pattern of interaction between members of a social occasion. All social reality has a fractal causality that varies nonlinearily according to the quality of the symbolic interactional process. Replication is impossible while falsification is a nonsense concept for systems displaying nonlinear dynamics. Given the role of symbolic interaction in all knowledge processes and given the options to select regions in phase-space for analyses and for generalization, all efforts to build general theory or universal laws are shown to be both a poetics and a politics.