language of nursing and at the same time under-
stand and use the language of disciplines that artic-
ulate with nursing. The lack of a nursing language
has been a handicap in nurses’ communications
about nursing to the public as well as to persons
with whom they work in the health field. There can
be no nursing language until the features of hu-
mankind specific to nursing are conceptualized and
named and their structure uncovered.
Men, women, and children are unitary beings.
They are embodied persons, and nurses must be
knowing about their biological and psychobiologi-
cal features. Viewing human beings as organisms
brings into focus the internal structure, the consti-
tution and nature of those human features that are
the foci of the life sciences. Knowing human beings
as agents or users of symbols has foundations in bi-
ology and psychology. Understanding human or-
ganic functioning, including its aberrations,
requires knowledge of human physiology, environ-
mental physiology, pathology, and other developed
and developing sciences.
The object view of individual human beings is a
view taken by nurses whenever they provide nurs-
ing for infants, young children, or adults unable to
control their positions and movement in space and
who contend with physical forces in their environ-
ment. This includes the inability to ward off physi-
cal force exerted against them by other human
beings. Taking the object view carries with it a re-
quirement for protective care of persons subject to
such forces. The features of protective care are un-
derstood in terms of impending or existent envi-
ronmental forces and known incapacities of
individuals to manage and defend themselves in
their environments, as well as in the nursing-
specific views of individuals that nurses take in
concrete nursing practice situations.
These five broad views of human beings sub-
sume nursing-specific views, and they aid in under-
standing them and in revealing their constitution
and nature. These broad views point to the sciences
and disciplines of knowledge that nurses must be
knowing in, and have some mastery of, in order to
be effective practitioners of nursing. Establishing
the linkages of nursing-specific views of human be-
ings to the named broader views is a task of nurs-
ing scholars.
Throughout the processes of giving nursing
care to individuals or multiperson units, such as
families, nurses use changing combinations of the
named views of human beings in accord with pre-
senting conditions and circumstances. Nurses also
may need to help individuals under nursing care to
take these views about themselves. As previously
stated, the person view is the guiding force.
The five described views of individual human
beings also come into play when nurses think about
and deal with themselves in nursing situations.
They know that they have rights as persons and as
nurses and that they must defend and safeguard
these personal and professional rights; their powers
of nursing agency must be adequate to fulfill re-
sponsibilities to meet nursing requirements of per-
sons under their care; they must know their
deficiencies, act to overcome them, or secure help
to make up for them; they must be protective of
their own biological well-being and act to safeguard
themselves from harmful environmental forces.
Nurses also have requirements for knowing nursing
and articulating fields in a dynamic way. There is
also a need for a nursing language that is enabling
for thinking nursing within its domain and bound-
aries and in its articulation with other disciplines
and for communicating nursing to others in nurs-
ing practice situations.MODEL BUILDING AND
THEORY DEVELOPMENT
The previously described nursing-specific views of
individual human beings are necessary for under-
standing and identifying (1) when and why indi-
viduals need and can be helped through nursing;
and (2) the structure of the processes through
which the help needed is determined and pro-
duced. Nurses’ continuing development of their
knowing about the person, agent, symbolist, organ-
ism, and object views of individuals is essential
continuing education for themselves as nurses and
as nursing scholars.
Such knowing is foundational to model making
and theory development in nursing. For example,
Louise Hartnett-Rauckhorst (1968) developed
models to make explicit what is involved physiolog-
ically and psychologically in voluntary, deliberate
human action, including motor behaviors. She
moved from available authoritative knowledge in
the fields of physiology, psychology, and the broad
field of human behavior to develop:146 SECTION III Nursing Theory in Nursing Practice, Education, Research, and Administration