Certainly, we acknowledge that something useful for nursing can be learned through existing methodologies, from both natural and human science traditions. For example, an experimental design can produce information about the effectiveness of a given clinical technique within a specified range of use (e.g., placement of an oral thermometer). Such information can be important and useful to the work of the nurse and useful to the client of nursing. It tells us nothing, however, of nursing. In fact, the central tenet underlying measurement in normal science directly contradicts the central tenet of human science: created versus creating. Thus, the fullness of the nursing situation is not amenable to study by measurement techniques. Yet, aspects of the nursing situation can be abstracted and studied as variables in relation to other variables. This does not, however, yield knowledge of the nursing situation in its fullest. At best, measurement approaches can call attention to an aspect so that it can be considered within the unfolding. Phenomenology, on the other hand, offers an example of an orientation and methodology that more closely approximates what is needed in a nursing method of inquiry. Phenomenology is an orientation toward inquiry that may be actualized through any one of a number of generic approaches, but is generally understood as the study of lived experience (e.g., Van Manen, 1990; Oiler, 1986). When the phenomenon conceptualized for study is representative of the nursing situation, nursing may be known. That is, new nursing knowledge may eventuate. New understanding of the meaning of the shared lived experience of caring between nurse and nursed enhancing personhood can be created. Yet, for the purposes of nursing, phenomenology also has its limits. For example, when phenomena which have been abstracted from a nursing situation are selected for study (that is, when phenomena are taken out of context), results of the inquiry cannot generate knowledge of nursing proper. For example, the understanding that comes in developing a description of the essential structure of what it is like for a nurse to be called to nurse informs us about nurses, but not about nursing directly. Similarly, an exquisite phenomenological description of what it is like for a person to live grieving is helpful in understanding the person. However, it should not be mistaken for knowledge of nursing, but knowledge which illuminates the study of nursing when taken back to the full context of the nursing situation. Further, the various phenomenologies in the literature come from frames of reference that are not nursing (e.g., existential psychology or educational psychology), and thus impose a "silent" borrowed framework when used to study nursing.