How Scientific Is Nursing? Answers From A New Characterization of Science

In the last few decades, nursing scholars have drawn on philosophy to establish the scientific status of nursing. However, well-known philosophical accounts of science, such as those by Popper and Kuhn, are primarily targeted at the pure natural sciences. Accordingly, the application of such accounts to nursing has led to dubious results. In this paper, we propose a fresh start and apply Hoyningen-Huene's recent account of science to nursing. According to Hoyningen-Huene, knowledge about a given topic such as nursing is scientific if, and only if, it is more systematic than other knowledge about this topic. Here, systematicity manifests in various dimensions such as description, explanation, and defense of knowledge claims. In our application of Hoyningen-Huene's account of science to nursing, we focus on current nursing practice and compare it with the state of nursing before the so-called Consensus Statement on Emerging Nursing Knowledge. Upon examining the dimensions considered by Hoyningen-Huene, we find that the knowledge currently used and gained by nurses is more systematic than it was before the Consensus Statement. For instance, in the dimension of prediction, knowledge has become more systematic through the use of classification systems. In the dimension of defending knowledge claims, systematicity has increased due to the use of measurement devices. According to our analysis, the scientific status of current nursing knowledge is partly due to the fact that nurses draw on knowledge from nursing science, a discipline that is organized like other scientific disciplines. Still, it is also the case that knowledge-gaining practices in nursing are more systematic than they were before the Consensus Statement.