KFD-Present State of Knowledge

Abstract

Leland B. Yeager believes that armchair theorizing is more than just the “simple sterile juggling of arbitrary assumptions” that occurs in the absence of fieldwork or the conventional scientific process. The scientific approach, which requires active examination of nature through data collection, contrasts with armchair scholarship. Even if an empirical scientist and an armchair philosopher use distinct methodologies, they might work together to uncover new facts or insights. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski was a vocal opponent of armchair theory, and his ideas are frequently summed up by the phrase “get off the verandah.” Encouraging fieldwork and observation. There are hundreds of publications on Kyasanur Forest Disease during the last several decades, mostly from data already published, a computer analyzed and dished out with fancy titles. It never mattered to science.” I have been trying to tell the same thing to our Indian colleagues, particularly during the last two or more decades, who are wedded to theorizing from stale data collected by others and stored in computers.