armchair
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈɑː(ɹ)mtʃɛə(ɹ)/
ipa: /ˈɑɹmt͡ʃɛɚ/
Forms: form: armchairs
form: armchairing
form: armchaired
form: armchaired
form: arm-chair
Etymology: From arm + chair.
Senses: examples: text: Research for program's subject matter is like mining gold. The more raw material we have, the more likely we are going to find gold nuggets. But this step is often overlooked and a program is "armchaired" from the office of the vice-president or vice-president of sales.
ref: 1966, Sales Management - Volume 97, Issues 8-14, page 31:
text: The very serious question is then raised as to whether reasonable and logical distractors can be "armchaired" or whether the practice of administering a question in open-end format to obtain logical distractors is a better procedure.
ref: 1970, Carmen J. Finley, Frances S. Berdie, The national assessment approach to exercise development, page 84:
text: We think it makes sense to generate interventions empirically by finding out how couples deal with conflict, rather than by armchairing interventions.
ref: 1976, John Mordechai Gottman, A couple's guide to communication, page xxv:
text: MBTI has four different variables, each of which has two possible values. This could be interpreted as an implicit claim that there are four dimensions to personality, and only two types of personality within each dimension. And Myers and Briggs had no basis on which to make such a claim and just sort of armchaired it. Interpreted that way, the theory is pseudoscientific and dumb.
ref: 2014 May 27, Scott Alexander, “On Types Of Typology”, in Slate Star Codex:
glosses: To create based on theory or general knowledge rather than data.
examples: text: In past years, we administered this questionnaire and gave the results to the president who sat at a conference table with top management and armchaired some answers.
ref: 1968, Daniel C. Pfannstiel, Barbara H. Matthews, Cooperative extension organization and administration:
text: Briefly it may be stated: Operations come first; concepts follow; theory aims at developing concepts, from operations, plus a nomological network for those concepts, which explains the structure of the data obtained through those operations. And this does not exclude the theorist from doing some 'armchairing' in thinking about logically consistent models, their empirical potentialities, their assumptions and their implications; he may, and usually will, venture some possible empirical interpretations of a model, but in doing so he will carefully avoid any substantive (nonformal) pre-operational definition of a concept or construct.
ref: 1976, Dato N De Gruijter, Leo J. Th. van der Kamp, Advances in Psychological and Educational Measurement, page 113:
text: Even before the Glasses had arrived in New Guinea, two American anthropologists at Tulane University, Ann and J. L. Fischer, had armchaired a connection between kuru and cannibalism by working their way through the findings of a team of anthropologists who had studied the Fore in the early 1950s, Ronald and Catherine Berndt, as well as the many papers on kuru that Gajdusek, Zigas and various Australian investigators had published.
ref: 2012, Richard Rhodes, Deadly Feasts:
glosses: To theorize based on analysis of data that was gathered previously; to reflect.
Related terms: ivory tower