Internet while making information freely available to all those with a computer and with
world wide web access also provides opportunities for those with particular sets of ideas
to keep those ideas isolated from truth-acquiring processes. As such then the Internet
poses a particularly insidious threat to honest enquiry. In addition, there is a tendency
within nursing for authority to be invested in the journals in which evidence is
published. This leads to a general perception that if something is published in journal x
it has a higher ‘truth’ value than if it were published in journal y. Thus enquiries can
gain status as somehow more truthful or more compelling when they are published in
one journal rather than another. And if this becomes part of a received wisdom then the
temptation to think ‘if it has been published in journal x it must be right’ may be
irresistible to both the closed-minded and the credulous nurse. Additionally, it matters
not how much protestation is made by the authors of papers in these publications that
their findings should be treated with caution because of design flaws or other noted
weaknesses. In published nursing research there remains a tendency for authors to
couch their conclusions and recommendations in terms that suggest the acknowledged
limitations are not really that important after all, rather what is important is, for
example, that their findings are consistent with the findings of (most) other studies in
the subject area. And further, there is a tendency for the consumers of nursing research
to pay attention to findings in ways that might be best described as credulous (that is,
the tendency to adopt a belief on insufficient grounds).
Evidence is indeed a necessary component of how we should come to believe the
veracity or otherwise of assertions but it is possible that few individuals exercise open-
mindedness in forming beliefs. It may be that rather than using evidence to form our
beliefs, some use evidence to support existing beliefs. This is not to say that we cannot
form beliefs on the basis of evidence nor it is to say that our beliefs cannot be revised in
the light of evidence but it is to say that there may be an understandable tendency to
choose our evidence to suit our beliefs. A stronger version of this is developed by
MacIntyre where he claims that our moral choices are all ultimately arbitrary. By way
of example, when asked why we think x is a good we might reply that x is a good
because, following utilitarian reasoning, x meets the criterion for goodness; but when
asked why we should accept utilitarian reasoning we would surely struggle to say
anything more than utilitarian reasoning seems to offer useful criteria by which to
determine the good. Evidence to support a firmly held belief such as a belief in the
inappropriate for nurses to be open-minded.
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