Phenomenology in the context of burn care: from 'a correct judgment' to 'a judgment with convinced validity'.

摘要

In 16 October 1639, Rene Descartes sent a letter to his friend Marin Mersenne, writing "the word 'truth,' in the strict sense, denotes the conformity of thought with its object." This is a clear description of the core concept of the correspondence theory of truth, which is the view that truth is correspondence to a fact. Modern health care practice has been well grounded on this view of truth or correctness. For example, a physician judged a 10-year-old boy to have 1% TBSA partial thickness burn on the left forearm and judged to treat this patient with occlusive dressing therapy. Epithelization was completed within 2 weeks, and the wound healed with mild pigmentation and without any scar formation. In this case, the judgments of the physician conform to the clinical result (external reality or object). It can be said that medical personnel who know something about burn care would agree that the judgment was correct. If this is acceptable for you, you are thinking in the field of the correspondence theory of truth. The theory is reasonable and meaningful, especially for retrospective evaluation and/or criticisms of variety of human practices such as medical and nursing practice. The theory, however, has serious problems when we try to apply it to examine the correctness of a judgment right in the middle of ongoing process. Interrogatively, it can be rephrased as "Can a clinician have a correct judgment right in the middle of their clinical practice?"The answer is "No." Why not?In this article, we are going to try to determine the reason why clinicians cannot have "a correct judgment" but can have "a judgment with convinced validity." The meaning and significance of "a judgment with convinced validity" will be discussed to emphasize the importance of clinical learning.