Returning from a week in the Highlands and Islands (where there is a lot of
fog), I was surprised to see that no-one had responded to Jacqueline
Fawcett's posting. Oh, well. Perhaps I could pose a couple of questions
for Jacqueline. The text is:
"I am a nurse and have a PhD in nursing. Consequently, I have little
interest in learning about the knowledge of other disciplines and absolutely
no interest in developing such knowledge."
(a) Jacqueline admits that this is chauvinistic, but isn't it rather more
than that? During the last few years, boundaries between academic
disciplines have been shifting radically, to the point that it's becoming
difficult for anyone to claim that they are "just" a sociologist, or just a
psychologist, or just a biologist. This is largely because important ideas
are being explored in a number of fields - evolution, for example (see
Trevor Hussey's papers and postings), or dynamical systems theory - and
cross-referencing between disciplines has reached avalanche proportions. On
the train, I was reading a book best classified as "cognitive anthropology",
which encompasses anthropology, cognitive psychology, neural networks, and
philosophy. In this sort of climate, sealing nursing off into a watertight
academic compartment seems... well, a bit narrow-minded, to be honest. If
all the other disciplines are learning from each other, why should nursing
be the odd one out?
(b) In any case, I assume that Jacqueline makes an exception of (at least)
philosophy and psychology - since there is a great deal of philosophy in the
JNS article, and a fair amount of (implicit) psychology. I would have
thought that "doing" philosophy and psychology (while claiming to have
little or no interest in them) was a trifle risky... unless the idea is
that nurses are entitled to philosophize about nursing, say, while knowing
nothing about philosophy in general. Anyway, my question is: if she is
prepared to smuggle in philosophy and psychology, what real force does her
insistence on nursing's distinctive (and apparently pristine) body of
knowledge have?
"If nursing is to be regarded as a discipline, then there must, by
definition, be a distinctive body of knowledge." Assume that's true.
Does it really follow that other disciplines can't contribute to the
creation of this distinctive body of knowledge?
Best wishes to everyone for the summer.
John
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