What is this image?
Your answer is dependent upon your knowledge base, your life experience, and on what you believe to be true.
The formation of any answer will first pass through these filters before you assert your most plausible explanation. Your presuppositions are these filters, these primal assumptions, through which you interpret life and assign meaning to it.
Presuppositions are deeply rooted in us, they vary from person to person, and undergo change as we travel through life. They underpin our values and ethics, and constitute the core foundation of all that we are and do; they are the fountain of what we believe ought to be and what ought not to be. They are so fundamental we often don’t recognize them, but they direct our thinking and doing every moment.
What did you decide? Abstract art? Computer bit-map? Microscopic cellular disease cluster? Electron microscope photo? Satellite photo? Enlarged pixels?
This image is a satellite photo of irrigation circles in southwest Kansas. Each white dot is a harvested circle, and each red dot an unharvested circle. Each circle is generally 1/2 mile diameter (4 per square mile = 1 section = 640 acres), though they can be up to a mile diameter.
How you answered was contingent on your presuppositions. Indeed, all of philosophy is grounded in presuppositions. For nursing philosophy to be useful, our presuppositions about human nature and the world must be accurate.
There exists a curious absence of presuppositional frameworks in nursing philosophy that I want to identify and wrestle with over the next several years. I am of the opinion that our best chance of a global definition of nursing lies in the secret room of presuppositions.
