Personal Philosophy of Nursing Paper Assignment

My Personal Philosophy of Nursing
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My Personal Philosophy of Nursing
Nursing is a professional discipline and requires knowledge of diverse types to articulate its epistemology. The epistemology of a discipline embodies the origin, nature, methods, and limits of its knowledge mass. Explicating the structure of the mass of knowledge that constitutes nursing involves philosophic analysis of the conceptualizations expressed by nurse scientists. The philosophic emphasis serves to address the broad undergirdings of human thought and action that have impacted on nursing. Before I will define, describe and explain my thoughts, feelings and beliefs on the four concepts of the nursing metaparadigm and their interrelationship to one another, I would like to discuss and expound first on the historic view of knowledge in nursing, and its metaparadigm.
Metaparadigm
An historic view of knowledge development requires elaboration of the history of the philosophy of science. Two major views of scientific knowledge, scientific inquiry and historicism, provide the framework for this explication. Each philosophic view is examined from the dimensions of its conception of theory, the sources for scientific activity, and the methods espoused as the way to engage in scientific work. Changes in philosophic thought impact on the knowledge a discipline pursues. The effects of beliefs and practices of philosophic trends on the growth and organization of nursing knowledge are discussed. The nature of science espoused by logical positivists impacted on the emergence of knowledge in nursing for a period extending into the 1960s, nearly two decades longer. Contemporary perspectives of a Weltanschauung or World View approach to the nature of knowledge are illustrated and their influence on currently emerging nursing knowledge is described. The formulations of Kuhn (1970) and Laudan (1977) are emphasized. A disciplinary matrix represents the shared commitments of the practitioners of a specialized community within a professional discipline; the elements are arranged in an ordered fashion and consist of symbols, models, values, and exemplars (Fawcett, 1984; Kuhn, 1974).
Kuhn (1970) referred to this conceptualization as a paradigm. A disciplinary matrix within the nursing research tradition would address the core concepts in greater specificity than would a metaparadigm, and therefore would be more restrictive in its application. Metaparadigm communicates the most global conceptualization of a discipline. Identification and description of the components of a metaparadigm depend on the world view of the members of the discipline. Fawcett (1996) defines metaparadigm as a statement identifying the phenomena relevant to a discipline and asserts that there is a metaparadigm of nursing. Nurse theorists are arguing for pluralism in theory development, but integrated into a context of nursing. A disciplinary matrix can give rise to multiple theories; research traditions are more global and can admit multiple disciplinary matrices.
Metaparadigm of Nursing
Forces impacting on this evolutionary matrix of nursing theory data types and methods include developments in the philosophy of science field and struggles...