SCIENCE, ABDUCTION AND THE FUZZY NURSE - AN EXPLORATION OF EXPERTISE

Benner's work on expertise in nursing drew heavily on the writing of D reyfus and Dreyfus in the field of computing. Dreyfus and Dreyfus argu ed that the continued failure of computer programmers to create an 'ex pert system', a program which could replicate the way that a human exp ert thinks, implied that experts do not think in a rational, analytic way, Dreyfus and Dreyfus therefore concluded that expertise is an intu itive process, and that 'the expert is simply not following any rules! He is... recognising thousands of special cases'. Applied to nursing, this model of expertise has a number of profound implications for pra ctice and education, and has been criticised for being elitist and del iberately obscure. This paper examines some recent innovations in comp uter logic, and argues that nursing can learn from a new breed of 'fuz zy' computer programmes which appear to be able not only to perform be tter than experts, but to verbalize their decision-making processes, B y beginning to understand how experts think, it might be possible to d evelop expertise in a more controlled and logical way, thereby improvi ng the practice of nursing.