This column on Philosophical Issues introduces a conceptual innovation, the midparadigm, designed to facilitate continued development of nursing knowledge while moving beyond the metaparadigm. The midparadigm is a conceptual structure lower in abstraction than a metaparadigm consisting of an organization of concepts that reflect shared scientific and practical values for theory development in reference to a practice-relevant context. In this introductory article, I explain its philosophical rationale and provide other groundwork about the midparadigm. The feature article is authored by a team of doctoral students who present an exemplar of a midparadigm, which they have called their prismatic midparadigm of nursing.
Keywords: knowledge development; metaparadigm; midparadigm; philosophy of science; theory.