ABSTRACT
An introduction to what the book aims to achieve, along with notes on the academic resources it makes use of. The overall aim of Part I is to make one particular claim more plausible than it might seem initially: the word ‘concept’ is a very useful one, to the point of being indispensable. Nevertheless, the word does not name anything. Or in soundbite terms: there are no such things as concepts. If this claim has any mileage, we will need an alternative to concept analysis as currently practised in nursing. Part II illustrates one possible alternative with a pair of case studies. It undertakes an exploration of the use of two expressions of interest to nursing: ‘hope’ and ‘moral distress’. ‘Hope’ is a common-or-garden word which has come to have clinical significance. In contrast, ‘moral distress’ is a phrase coined by a philosopher in the 1980s; unlike ‘hope’, it is not used in everyday conversation. Both are investigated using philosophical and linguistic approaches described in Part I. The chapter introduces a hypothetical Reader, discusses the style of argument and concludes with a potted history of concept analysis in nursing since Walker and Avant launched the canonical version.
