Do women conceptualize-understand, know about, and react to-shame differently from the way men do? Does the experience and knowledge of shame have a gender-specificity, and along what lines could it be analyzed? By introducing a distinction between life or enduring experiences, "Erfahrung," and episodic or occuwent experiences, "Erkbnis ," and by juxtuposing this distinction with the Rykan notion that knowledge is dispositional this paper argues for the plausibility of a gender-specificity .A central query in my work on women's shame has been how to understand what a woman knows when she feels shame (or recognizes another woman's shame) and how, by what means-that is, these are questions of justification, of types of inferences, of the warranted assertability of these inferences-she knows what she knows or claims to know.' (Subsequent questions here are: how is the knowledge in question "used"; what behavior, actions or activities, forms of life, and situations can it be tied to or be seen as integral to, of what understanding does it form a part, what overall meaning and significance does or can it have?) The principal challenge has been to discern and delineate the most significant specificities of female experience and female knowledge pertaining to the socially complex, intriguing emotion of shame. However, as often noted by feminists, mainstream conceptualizations of experience and knowledge have proved insufficient, in that they do not capture the specific conditions of the lives women live and the specific knowledge of those lives that women acquire. The claim that women, by force of their experiences of subordination, know things that men do not know-an intuitive and common-sense truism-has often been difficult to substantiate, given that experience, especially emotional experience, is predominantly construed as HypaM vol. 13, no.

The aim of this article was to illuminate the issue of basic research in nursing and to problematize its relevance for our discipline. First, we asked leading nursing scholars in the Nordic countries to share their views on basic research in nursing. Thereafter, the ideas, views and suggestions of the scholars were amalgamated with insights from the literature and from the discussions in our project team. Our two guiding questions were: What role can basic research be assigned? Which, if any, forms of basic research can be identified? We found that basic nursing research may be seen as a necessary basis for applied research, as a contribution to applied research, or that the whole issue is seen as a pseudo-issue. We further found that basic nursing research can be seen as either contextual or general as well as either intradisciplinary or multidisciplinary in form. We conclude by the following three succinct remarks or assertions: that basic nursing research is not to be equated with biomedical conceptions of basic research; that basic nursing research may take place on several theoretical levels; and finally, that an indiscriminate dismissal of basic research in nursing may affect the cognitive autonomy of our discipline.

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