John Paley
16 February, 2021
8am – 9am PST, 11am-12pm Est,
4pm-5pm GMT
The event is free, but registration is required. Register here.
John Paley will be introducing his new book.
Following John’s presentation there will be responses from nursing’s top editors, Roger Watson until recently editor-in-chief of Journal of Advanced Nursing and Sally Thorne, editor of Nursing Inquiry.
Please email p.snelling@worc.ac.uk if you have any questions.
Concept analysis is an established genre of inquiry in nursing, introduced in the 1970s. Currently, over 100 concept studies are published annually, yet the methods used within this field have rarely been questioned. In Concept Analysis in Nursing: A New Approach, John provides a critical analysis of the philosophical assumptions that underpin nursing’s concept analysis methods. He argues, provocatively, that there are no such things as concepts, as traditionally conceived.
Drawing on Wittgenstein and Construction Grammar, the book first makes a case for dispensing with the traditional concept of a ‘concept’, and then provides two examples of a new approach, examining the use of ‘hope’ and ‘moral distress’. Casting doubt on the assumption that ‘hope’ always stands for an ‘inner’ state of the person, the book shows that the word’s function varies with the grammatical construction it appears in. Similarly, it argues that ‘moral distress’ is not the name of a mental state, but a normative classification used to bolster a narrative concerning nursing’s identity.