The Centrality of Theoretical Thinking and the Value of Empirical Evidence

Abstract

On a recent balmy summer day, while scholarly work sat in a briefcase with ever-accessible laptop computer, I was playfully engaged with 5-year-old grandson Elliot on the porch of our summer home overlooking Lake Erie. With the Marblehead lighthouse and Cedar Point Amusement Park visible in the distance, we were occupying our time with the contents of a freshly opened container of a modeling compound. While both of us were well acquainted with the properties of modeling clay, Play-Doh, and Silly Putty, neither had prior experience with this particular medium. It was composed of a pink gelatinous-looking material and zillions of tiny white foam beads. Taking a handful and attempting to form it into a shape, Elliot remarked that it was too crumbly. When I attempted to shape the compound myself, I too noticed that it wasn't hanging together very well. Elliot posed, what's your theory about this stuff not sticking together? As a theorist and teacher of nursing theory, I was a little surprised and more than gleeful that, at age 5, grandson even had the word theory in his vocabulary. Then I began to wonder what the word meant to him, particularly as graduate nursing students often seemed to have some innate aversion to the term. Buying time and plying the material in hand, I said pensively, Hmmm, theory. (pause) I'll have to think about Immersing himself in thought, Elliot stared at the crumbs of gel and beads scattered across the tabletop, fingered them gingerly, and began offering his ideas freely: maybe the stuff was too old, maybe there were too many beads for the amount of goo, maybe there was something wrong with the goo, maybe the beads had soaked up the sticky from the goo, maybe our hands were too dry. I listened raptly as he generated and explained each idea, interjecting an occasional Hmmm or shrug to encourage him on. I was fascinated by his thinking, the experiences he drew from, the notions he connected, and the reasons he offered to support each plausible explanation. I was impressed with the extent of his knowledge and his creativity in applying it. I struggled to listen and to keep it all in head at the same time as I also attempted to analyze what he was actually doing. Theorizing. He was indeed theorizing. It was all there: a phenomenon, concepts, relational statements, assumptions, a worldview. My grandson was an armchair theorist. At a fundamental level, he had a firm grasp of the meaning of the word theory. Finally, exasperated by silence, feeling unsure about which of his theories was correct or true, and unsatisfied that he had no solution to his practical problem, he exclaimed, Grandma, what is your theory? Well, I said, holding out to his receptive fingers a warm, pliable homogeneous mass of the stuff, my theory is that the goo had to be warmer to stick together and to the balls. …