WHAT IS THE CENTRAL UNIFYING FOCUS IN NURSING?

Dear Madam, There are many perspectives from different standing points with distinguished context of truths in nursing, some philosophers may hold multiple truths, and others hold only one truth. However, truth in nursing is assumed in the eye of beholders, which means multiple perspectives are appropriate for knowledge development in nursing.1 There are no less than nine different philosophical orientations identified have some relevance to nursing knowledge development, including empiricism, pragmatism, paradigmatic historicism, and science as a problem solving, feminism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and post-structuralism. It is indicated that a plurality of philosophies maybe necessary to reflect the many facets of nursing science.2 Nevertheless, some philosophers argue that as long as the multi worldviews have been embraced by nursing as the basic of conception, nursing knowledge would be fragmented because of a plurality of nursing conceptualism.3 In addition, Claxton4 mentioned, “we are like the inhabitants of thousands of little islands, all in the same part of the ocean, yet totally out of touch with each other”.4 Thus, Meleis5 suggested that to avoid being forever fragmented and divided, the integration of different perspectives is needed,5 which is also supported by Newman who also agreed with multiperspectives, but convincing to a unitaryperspective for nursing.6 At this point, it can be drawn that multi-paradigms for nursing are accepted, but the same location/unified conceptualization need to be centered. It is similar with Roy’s view of Unity in Diversity and Universal Truth,7 a way to bridge multiple approaches in nursing. The belief in the existence of universal truths is the idea that no simple insight is enough, in and of it self, to