Discourse Links Between Philosophy, Theory, Practice, and Research

Abstract

Nurses are a practical lot. Like other practitioners, we may brush aside the philosophical as "hypothetical" or irrelevant. To say that something is a philosophical question often means that it is too abstract to be of consequence. I want to rehabilitate the term philosophical by describing the goals of three different philosophical styles of inquiry. (1) Critical thinking evaluates theories, research, and practice. (2) Creative and edifying philosophies generate new possibilities. In nursing, for example, new understandings and possibilities for care and ways of facilitating recovery, healing, and health-care delivery require creative or edifying philosophies. (3) Articulation thinking and research gives language to and illustrates experiential learning and practical knowledge of patients' families or of community nurses or other health-care practitioners. The goal is to articulate meanings and knowledge embedded in everyday lived worlds that may be poorly described or lack an adequate public language. Unlike categorizing and naming things for classification or diagnostic systems, articulation seeks to illustrate how commonly held meanings, qualitative distinctions, and practices function in everyday life. Critical Thinking Analytic philosophy has traditionally been concerned with critically evaluating thinking and therefore primarily with epistemology - that is, how and what we can know. As members of a practice discipline we need to critically evaluate nursing assessments, interventions, and outcomes, and to critically evaluate theories of disease, illness, recovery, health promotion, development, and so on. Analytic philosophy offers