Nursing scholars continuously refine nursing knowledge and the philosophical foundations of nursing practice. They advance nursing knowledge by creating new knowledge and weighing the relevance of developments in cognate sciences. Nurse philosophers go further by providing epistemological and ontological arguments for explanations of nursing phenomena. In this article, I engage with Bender's arguments about why mechanisms should have more primacy as carriers of nursing knowledge. Despite the careful scholarship involved, Bender's arguments need to be more convincing. Accordingly, this article encourages (...) debate about Bender's arguments for reorientating nursing science to mechanisms. I begin by suggesting that the claim that the theory‐practice divide can be overcome by reorientating to mechanisms is acceptable only if we accept Bender's depiction of the challenge. Then I question the ontology Bender relies on to justify reorientating nursing science. After that, I argue that mechanisms in models that parallel analytical sociology undermine the kind of nursing science Bender advocates. I illustrate my arguments with a social mechanism thought experiment. Then I explain why Bender's arguments cannot escape the received view of science or inform emancipatory nursing action without theory. Finally, I mention some caveats and implications for nursing science. (shrink)

Jacqueline Fawcett's nursing metaparadigm—the domains of person, health, environment, and nursing—remains popular in nursing curricula, despite having been repeatedly challenged as a logical philosophy of nursing. Fawcett appropriated the word “metaparadigm” (indirectly) from Margaret Masterman and Thomas Kuhn as a devise that allowed her to organize then‐current areas of nursing interest into a philosophical “hierarchy of knowledge,” and thereby claim nursing inquiry and practice as rigorously “scientific.” Scholars have consistently rejected the logic of Fawcett's metaparadigm, but have not yet proposed (...) a substantially agreed‐upon alternative. Through an analysis of articles introducing and critiquing Fawcett's metaparadigm, I argue for a re‐conceptualized metaparadigm that articulates nursing's ontology. What exists for the nursing discipline are not already‐demarcated metaparadigm domains, but rather interdependent, dynamic relations that constitute people, including nurses, in their health/environment circumstance. The nursing discipline aims to skillfully access this dynamic relationality as the basis for action and reflection to produce both positive health trajectories and knowledge that facilitates future action and reflection. Further inquiry into the onto‐epistemology of nursing will produce a more robust understanding of nursing practice, science, and philosophy, and clarify its unique contribution to health and healthcare. (shrink)

Nursing claims a significant history of engaging philosophical inquiry. To better understand the rationale for this engagement, and what nursing understands itself to achieve through philosophical inquiry, we conducted an interpretive synthesis of the recent nursing literature to identify what nurses are doing when they say they are doing philosophy. The overarching finding was that while vanishingly few articles articulated any definition of philosophy, the synthesis showed how nursing considers philosophical engagement a generative mode for asking and answering questions in/for (...) nursing. Whatever aspects of nursing were focused on in these articles, and they were myriad, philosophy was invoked as an appropriate modality to work through that aspect rigorously, critically, and with an expectation that something “knowledgeable” would result from the effort. Based on the synthesis, we conclude that nursing philosophy could be considered a specific modality of nursing practice by which nursing is both done and delineated, a discursive practice in which we continually assess and explore and adapt and advance our understanding of the discipline in service to advancing our unique efficacy. This definition of “nursing philosophy” provides an opening for further inquiry helping to illuminate its functionalities and potentialities for outputs that can facilitate rigorous practice, education, and scholarship. (shrink)

There is an enduring debate in nursing regarding the art–science dualism, involving an articulation of two distinct ‘kinds’ of disciplinary knowledge: objective/scientific and subjective/artistic. Nursing identifies both as necessary, yet unbridgeable, which creates problems in constructing a coherent disciplinary knowledge base. We describe how this problem arises based on an ontological assumption of two different kinds of ‘stuff’ in the world: that with essential determinate properties and that without essential properties. We experiment with a solution by ontologically understanding the world (...) as made from a single kind: That the most irreducible element of the world is process, in that reality is a continuous construction whereby subject and object are products, not independent constituents, of reality. Process philosophy overcomes nursing's ontological bifurcation and enables nursing's art–science dualism to be re‐conceptualized as a cohesive logic of skilled reality production. An unavoidable implication of a process turn in nursing philosophy is that the disciplinary goal no longer becomes a privileged ‘body of knowledge’ that authorizes, which has always been a defining challenge in nursing. Rather, and more productively perhaps, the aim is for greater sophistication and plurality in its ongoing commitment to attuning to reality in ways that shape disciplinary attainment. (shrink)

My purpose in this short response to Clinton's interesting article On Bender's orientation to models: Towards a philosophical debate on covering laws, theory, emergence and mechanisms in nursing science, which is published in this issue, is not to provide any counterargument to Clinton's interpretation of my own argument; readers are welcome to interrogate both articles at their leisure and make their own conclusions. What I will do instead is provide a brief critical assessment of my own (il)logic re bringing in (...) the notion of mechanism as conceived by Machamer, Darden and Craver into an argument for models versus theories as a carrier of nursing knowledge. (shrink)

This essay argues for a new perspective on the analysis and evaluation of middle‐range theory. The commonly used criteria for theory evaluation in nursing are not as useful as they should be, and the root of the problem is an inappropriate understanding of middle‐range theory. In spite of their name, middle‐range theories should not be analysed and evaluated as concrete or limited versions of more general theories. Rather, they are best understood as models. The latter sections of this essay present (...) a new method for analysing middle‐range theories and new criteria for their evaluation. Analysing and evaluating theories relevant to nursing as models has the capacity to increase their scholarly and clinical usefulness. (shrink)