ABSTRACT
Knowledge, skills and attitudes together form the essentials of professional practice. The acquisition of acceptable attitudes in the education and training of professionals has usually been left to the socialisation process that, while producing a degree of conformity, is haphazard and often unplanned. Professional knowledge may, therefore, be seen as that selection from the body of knowledge that is regarded by specific members of an occupation as being the base upon which that occupation’s practice is founded. In the light of new discoveries and rapidly changing perspectives it might be argued that some types of knowledge, e.g. technological knowledge, are only true in relation to the present state of the discipline. I. Scheffler highlights the three broad philosophical approaches to knowledge: rationalist, empiricist and pragmatic. Knowledge appears to be subjective rather than objective: that is, that knowledge is only knowledge when it has been internalised by the human mind.
