Unwritten knowledge in nursing: consider the spoken as well as the written word.

Knowledge has been defined as familiarity gained by experience or a person's range of information and theoretical understanding (Sykes, 1982). The distinction is made to avoid confusion with the knowledge of scientism (Bullock, Stallybrass, & Trombley, 1988), where true or factual knowledge is held to be derivable only from the inductive methods of the natural sciences. Knowledge has its origins in a broader field of understanding than that of empirical measurement.