theorize

theorize about (someone or something)

To speculate, conjecture, or make guesses about someone or something. Everyone has been theorizing about what the company's next product might be. If I'm going into business with someone, I don't want to have to speculate about them, their past, or their motivations—I want concrete facts.
See also: theorize

theorize on (something)

To speculate, conjecture, or form a hypothesis about something, especially in manner that is abstract or without supporting evidence. These analysts who spend so much time theorizing on the effects of these economic changes will have on the working class have no idea what it's like to actually live through them. We've theorized on several different methods of enhancing cellular regeneration, but it will be many years before technology will prove whether or not they could be viable.
See also: on, theorize
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

theorize about someone or something

to hypothesize about someone or something; to conjecture about someone or something. Let's not waste time theorizing about Ted. He won't change. I can only theorize about what happened.
See also: theorize

theorize on something

to make a theory about something. There is no point in theorizing on something when you have all the empirical evidence you need to draw a conclusion. He spent the afternoon theorizing on the origin of the universe.
See also: on, theorize
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.
See also:
  • theorise
  • theorised
  • theorises
  • theorising
  • theorize about
  • theorize about (someone or something)
  • speculate on (something)
  • speculate about
  • speculate in
  • speculate on
References in periodicals archive
The relevant question is whether this is the proper point of theorization or whether one should theorize between cases to establish an analogy between them.
I 'theorize' that we would learn and understand much more about ourselves-in-our-worlds, and much more about others-in-their-worlds, and consequently get along much better with each other than we have been doing over the centuries.
Mothers who have limited resources and also regard a child as extremely difficult to raise or unlikely to produce grandchildren--because of factors such as illness--are most likely to resort to adoption, child abuse, and even child killing, George theorizes.
Kurtz theorizes that when Matthew's head hit the windshield, he damaged or severed some of his olfactory neurons, millions of tassel-like nerve cells in the nasal cavity that--when funtioning--can detect some 10,000 odors (and nearly as many flavors).
In these cases, a genetic mutation may foster the development early in life of an unusually direct connection between auditory and visual brain regions, theorize neuroscientist Jeffrey A.
Infants opted for this simpler technique when they figured that the adult had a good reason--holding the blanket--for not using her hands on the box, the researchers theorize.
Having a nose for smells may confer reproduction-related benefits, such as helping women forge close relationships with children and mates and the ability to detect poisons in food while pregnant, the researchers theorize.--B.B.
It's likely that this version of the DRD4 gene, which occurs in a sizable minority of people worldwide, resulted from one or more unusual mutations of the common form and then increased in frequency as the Stone Age wound down, around 40,000 years ago, Ding and his coworkers theorize.
In this book, Putnam theorizes that people today have less access to social capital, "the connections among individuals -- social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them." This creates a disconnect that is a serious threat to society because communities with less social capital have more social problems such as teenage pregnancy, higher suicide rates, and more crime.
Discharge to a long term care facility may account for some patients not receiving the medication they need, theorizes Joan T.
The team theorizes that the fields induce nanometer-scale paraffin particles to bunch in larger specks.
In her final instant of consciousness, Mike theorizes, Jennifer "must have felt it--the eighty-billion-year heartbeat" (115).
Given this species' million-year run of success, Lovejoy theorizes, its males probably obtained food consistently by forming working alliances, mainly among dose relatives.
His book powerfully theorizes the limitations of such an integrative model of the social as the body politic.
It's one of the paradoxes, I think, Derrida theorizes for us: How do you put the local back into thinking about the general?