“Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding” Kaplan (1964). Kaplan's critique underscores a worry that a particular method would come to be synonymous with the scientific method. Our field forged just two hammers that now represent our collective definition of the scientific method. These twin hammers — linear statistical modeling and self-report measurement — severely restrict our explanatory ability and leave our field vulnerable to scientific irrelevance. We must forge new hammers, and theorize new ways to wield them, in order to explain complex multi-level human communication phenomena. This working group will consider questions such as 1) how can my hammer help answer questions that I am not already using it to answer?, 2) “what would it mean to make a coherent part-whole linkage between two or more levels in communication's hierarchy?, and 3) how could we even know if we've done it?