Not Yet Epistemic: Re-Reading Barbara Carper's Patterns of Knowing

Barbara Carper's 1978 Fundamental Patterns of Knowing in Nursing is widely regarded as a seminal text in nursing, at least in the United States, and is commonly viewed as a nursing epistemology. The 1978 article reproduces one chapter (Chapter 5) of Carper's 1975 doctoral dissertation, a work that has received comparatively little philosophical attention. In this paper I turn to Carper's dissertation to trace the philosophical project within which the four patterns of knowing took form. Drawing on historical and textual analysis, I situate Carper's dissertation within twentieth-century philosophies of meaning/significance, particularly the educational philosophy of Philip H. Phenix. After describing Phenix's philosophy and its broader philosophical context, I show how it is taken up and systematically reworked in Carper's dissertation. Read within this context, the patterns become newly intelligible as differentiated conceptualizations participating in the organization of nursing as a legitimate academic discipline. I then trace how Carper's reception within nursing reconstituted the patterns as an epistemological problem, shifting philosophical attention to their justification and evaluation as forms of nursing knowledge. What this re-reading does is not simply broaden our understanding of the patterns of knowing; it releases the patterns from their by now almost automatic identification with epistemology. Re-situating the patterns within its project makes visible dimensions of nursing obscured by this epistemological framing, and makes them newly available for philosophical inquiry.