Connecting philosophy and practice: implications of two philosophic approaches to pain for nurses' expert clinical decision making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
McCaffery's definition of pain as 'whatever the patient says it is' was truly revolutionary for nursing because of its capacity to lend credibility to the patient's pain experience. However, this definition, still widely in use, represents a particular philosophic approach to pain that has limitations for nurses' expert clinical decision making. In this paper, we trace the evolution of explanations for pain and discuss two philosophic approaches to pain that are common today. The first approach, the externalist perceptual view of pain, considers pain as a perceptual experience, one that like any perceptual experience can be 'misperceived' by the person having the experience. The second approach, the non-representational view of pain, considers pain as a holistic experience, one where physical and existential aspects necessarily coincide. These two approaches, while both emphasizing the importance of believing the patient's expression, have different implications for clinical decision making. Only the first approach permits nurses to exercise the nuanced judgement that differentiates pain from other related conditions such as anxiety, suffering or meaninglessness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.086 | 0.097 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.128 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".