Working Chance: Peirce's Semiotic Contrasted With Benner's Intuition and Illustrated Through a Semiosis of a Novel Event in the Context of Nursing

As a practicing clinical nurse, a phenomenon I experienced at times was the sudden acute sense that something was going wrong with a person in care at the sub-critical unit in the hospital where I worked. In fact, many hospital nurses have their story of "something's not right" in relation to a person they were caring for/with, in that the day started with them on a coherent path to healing and then suddenly the nurse feels something is going very wrong, and yet there is nothing observable that would justify such a feeling. This feeling would be called "intuition" by many nurses, a concept most notably theorized in nursing by Patricia Benner in her extensive program of scholarship. Benner defines intuition as "understanding without rationale." Benner opposes embodied intuition and rational abstract reasoning and creates criteria for the use of each by nursing depending on whether the clinical situation is familiar or novel. The philosophical idea is that the new must be reasoned with a different mode of thought than the familiar. Charles Sanders Peirce was a philosopher of reasoning. He defined logic as the theory of reasoning, which by the end of his career he was declaring was only another name for semiotic. Peirce argued that all reasoning/semiosis is done through signs, or more accurately sign-activity. Semiotic is the philosophical schema providing the concepts and methods by which semiosis - reasoning - happens. Importantly, semiotic does not oppose different modes of thought, and conceptualizes reasoning as a process that functions in familiar as well as novel situations. In this paper I describe Peirce's philosophy of semiotic. I then provide an example relevant to nursing by conducting a semiosis of the nursing scenario above to show how nursing "works chance," or novelty, in a way that doesn't need to resort to rational abstract reasoning and yet is different than Benner's notion of intuition.