ABSTRACT
Over the past couple of decades, philosophers of science have emphasized the importance of scientific models, as well as or instead of theories, and have paid increasing attention to scientific practice. In this chapter, Robyn Bluhm provides an overview of the logical empiricist approach to science and its influence on nursing theory. In doing so, work from philosophers and nurses, including Silva and Rothbart, Suppe and colleagues, and Risjord, is recruited to show how logical empiricism has influenced – not always for the good – nursing scholars’ conceptualization of theories. Recent work by Risjord, and also by Bender, is then discussed, and the importance of models for nursing research is argued. In the final section of this chapter, work on models is developed to emphasize the importance of attending to the practice of modelling. It is proposed that as nursing scholars were increasingly influenced by philosophy of science, in part because of their need to characterize the nursing role and academic nursing education, their understanding of the latter two kinds of research changed.
