Practice and the Human Sciences: The Case for a Judgment-Based Practice of Care

Teachers, nurses, psychotherapists, and other practitioners of care are under pressure to substitute specific, prescribed techniques in place of using their own judgment. Donald E. Polkinghorne assembles the case for the return to judgmentbased practice for the professions that engage in direct persontoperson interaction with those they serve. Set in the larger context of the technification of society, Polkinghorne draws from Weber, Heidegger, Ihde, Bourdieu, de Certeau, and other philosophers to trace the advancing power of the technological worldview in Western culture and uses Aristotle, Dewey, and Gadamer to help make his case that we should be doing things very differently.

Author Biography: Donald E. Polkinghorne is Professor of Counseling Psychology and holder of the Attallah Chair in Humanistic Psychology at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Methodology for the Human Sciences: Systems of Inquiry and Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, both published by SUNY Press.