Fundamental Patterns Of Knowing In Nursing

Introduction The papers that I have choose is Sue K. Donaldson and Dorothy M. Crowley’s “The discipline of nursing”, John R. Cutcliffe and K. Lynn Wieck’s “Salvation or damnation: deconstructing nursing’s aspirations to professional status”, and Barbara A. Carper’s “Fundamental patterns of knowing in nursing”. The paper of Donaldson and Crowley stated that discipline was divided into academic and professional, and nursing is under professional discipline. Cutcliffe and Wieck’s paper analysed the professional status of nursing, and Carper discussed the four fundamental pattern of knowing in nursing.

Body Over the past century, nurse leaders have attempted to secure a unique identity for a profession (Butt

This value orientation determines the distinctive perspective of the discipline (Donaldson and Crowley, 1986, p. 247 ). Within this value orientation, the empirical science of nursing can develop. They suggested that the discipline of nursing was unified by the interest in three themes (Donaldson and Crowley, 1986, p. 242).
1. Concern with the principles and laws that given the life process, well-being, and optimum functioning of human beings either sick or well.
2. Concern with the patterning of human behavior in interaction with the environment in critical life situations.
3. Concern with the processes by which positive changes in health status are affected. The discipline of nursing is aligned with another discipline in the academy. According to Donaldson and Crowley, there is a body of knowledge oriented toward particular interests and framed by a related set of concepts in any discipline. Inquiry into the subject matter proceeds scientifically, and like any other science, it may take “basic” and “applied” forms. In this way, Donaldson and Crowley were able to identify “the essence of nursing research and of the common elements of threads that give coherence to an identifiable body of knowledge” (Donaldson and Crowley, 1986, p.

She divided nursing knowledge into “empirics”, “ethics”, “esthetics” (aesthetics), and “personal knowledge” (Carper, 1978). This classification of nursing knowledge had several important consequences. First, it clearly separated ethical knowledge from empirical knowledge. Empirics, according to Carper, was the domain of scientific knowledge: “knowledge about empirical for the purpose of describing, explaining and predicting phenomena of special concern to the discipline of nursing” (Carper, 1978, p. 14). Ethics, on the other hands, is “focused on matters of obligation or what ought to be done” (Carper, 1978, p.20). Like Walker and Beckstrand, Carpers held that ethical knowledge and scientific knowledge were independent. Value judgments are not amenable to scientific inquiry; scientific inquiry should not be influenced by values. The second important consequence of Carper’s analysis was that it drew a strong distinction between empirical knowledge and practical