ABSTRACT
Having considered a sample of professional fields and having studied episodes of reflection-in-action in each of them, we are now in a position to return to two of the questions with which we began this study:
I have tried in Part II to show how practitioners in very differ ent sorts of professions reveal an underlying similarity in the art of their practice, and especially in the artful inquiry by which they sometimes deal with situations of uncertainty, in stability, and uniqueness. This is the pattern of reflection-inaction which I have called “ reflective conversation with the situation.” In chapter 5, 1 showed how architectural designing and psychotherapy can both be seen as variations on this under lying process, and in the subsequent chapters on the sciencebased professions, planning, and management, I have de scribed what I take to be versions of the same process.
