Critical Thinking: Toward a Nursing Science Perspective

Critical thinking is an important phenomenon in nursing science because of its implications for education, practice, and the advancement of nursing knowledge. As a context-dependent, evolving life process, critical thinking appears to be congruent with assumptions and principles of SUHB. Thus, it may be asserted that critical thinking arises within the mutual process of human and environment and thus is a pattern manifestation of the human-environment field process. Before this assertion can be fully accepted, however, much investigation is needed. Nurse scholars are called upon to re-examine critical thinking and to consider possibilities that, until now, have been neglected or unimagined. To date, the positivistic view of critical thinking has yielded limited information. Nurse scientists, therefore, have an opportunity to extend and refine knowledge of critical thinking by embarking upon new and exciting avenues of discovery.