I thought nursing theory was something invented just to close the prestige gap with doctors.
The Wikipedia article makes it clear, perhaps unwittingly, that “theory” here does not mean what it means in science. In science, a theory is a coherent set of beliefs about how some phenomenon works that constrains your expectation about what you will observe to some subset of what you might observe. In the humanities and in most of social science, and apparently in nursing, it is the other way round: a theory is a coherent set of beliefs about how some phenomenon works that constrains your actual observations to lie within what the theory says they will be. This is why there are so many theories of the same thing, and no-one seems to care whether any of them are true, or even think that is a sensible question to ask.
In science, a theory is a coherent set of beliefs about how some phenomenon works that constrains your expectation about what you will observe to some subset of what you might observe. In the humanities and in most of social science, and apparently in nursing, it is the other way round: a theory is a coherent set of beliefs about how some phenomenon works that constrains your actual observations to lie within what the theory says they will be. This is why there are so many theories of the same thing, and no-one seems to care whether any of them are true, or even think that is a sensible question to ask.
This is the best formulation of this class of criticisms of the social sciences that I have ever read.
It doesn’t indicate that people who don’t participate in fields where expectations are clouded by dogma are any more virtuous, of course. They’re simply less likely to get away with it.
I thought nursing theory was something invented just to close the prestige gap with doctors.
The Wikipedia article makes it clear, perhaps unwittingly, that “theory” here does not mean what it means in science. In science, a theory is a coherent set of beliefs about how some phenomenon works that constrains your expectation about what you will observe to some subset of what you might observe. In the humanities and in most of social science, and apparently in nursing, it is the other way round: a theory is a coherent set of beliefs about how some phenomenon works that constrains your actual observations to lie within what the theory says they will be. This is why there are so many theories of the same thing, and no-one seems to care whether any of them are true, or even think that is a sensible question to ask.
But maybe you can’t say that to your professor.
This is the best formulation of this class of criticisms of the social sciences that I have ever read.
It doesn’t indicate that people who don’t participate in fields where expectations are clouded by dogma are any more virtuous, of course. They’re simply less likely to get away with it.
I didn’t mean to imply they where.