While the work of several scholars has influenced our understanding (e.g., Gadamer, 1989; Van Manen, 1990; Ray, 1994; Reeder, 1988), Macdonald's (1975) interpretation from the field of humanistic education is especially meaningful. He explains hermeneutic knowing methodologically as "circular rather than linear in that the interpretation of meaning in hermeneutic understanding depends on a reciprocal relation" (p. 286) rather than on a fixed normative reference point. The hermeneutic circle models the idea of reciprocal relation, but Macdonald goes further to call for a self-reflective science that will "transcend problems of monological and hermeneutic meaning" (p. 287). The nature of nursing as expressed in the Nursing as Caring theory is a reciprocal relation, one characterized by its grounding in person as caring, and as persons connected in oneness in caring. Sciencing in nursing from this perspective must go beyond linearity to encompass the dialogic circling involved in the nursing situation. This places the discipline of nursing among the human sciences, and calls for methods of inquiry that assure the circle or dialogue, and further, fully accommodate that which can be known of nursing. Nursing is properly catalogued as one of the human sciences for many reasons. The most basic reason is that the discipline and the disciplined practice of nursing directly involve persons in the fullness of their humanness. From our perspective, this means person as caring. Person as caring implies person in community, connected in oneness with others and with the universe, person freely choosing the living of values which are expressions of caring. This nursing ontology requires an epistemology consonant with human science values and methods. To know of, through and with nursing necessitates methods and techniques that honor freedom, creativity, and interconnectedness. In Chapter 4, we asserted that nursing knowledge is created and discovered within and from within the nursing situation. (Nursing situation, you may recall, is understood as a shared lived experience in which the caring between the nurse and the one nursed enhances personhood.) Therefore, because the locus of nursing inquiry is the nursing situation, the systematic study of nursing calls for a new methodology that recognizes that fact.