Mass shooting in the middle school Vladislav Ribnikar in Belgrade

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Not at all. My objections to Kleck’s paper include things like poor methodology and improper sampling. Social science papers that don’t commit these errors would not fall under that criticism.

Boru

And the methodology of comparative linguistics papers isn't even poorer? Virtually all comparative linguistics papers assume in their methodology that sound changes are regular, which is an assumption that's impossible to prove, and it's not obvious that it's true. As for the improper sampling... Well, like I've said, I think you could reject the entire linguistic typology with such rhetorics. Perhaps the pattern that most of the languages have a subject-first word-order (SVO or SOV) has to do with almost all languages coming from some unreconstructed proto-language with such a word order. So, that pattern could be an illusion, rather than a cross-linguistic tendency. Perhaps the fact that in most languages around the world the first-person and the second-person pronoun tend to start either with 'm' and 't', respectively, or with 'n' and 'm', respectively, has to do with nearly all languages around the world descending from two proto-languages with such pronouns, and we therefore have a biased sample and that pattern is an illusion. You can reject most of the facts from linguistic typology with "Perhaps we have a biased sample.".

But that's in no way comparable to what Kleck did. Sometimes, unproven (even unprovable) assumptions are necessary in historical research - ya gotta start somewhere. 

But Kleck wasn't doing historical research or historical investigation. He wasn't constrained to make assumptions that may or may not be true. He deliberately chose parameters that would skew his research towards the results he wanted and relied primarily on subjective, pre-disposed witness statements to arrive at his conclusions. Any criminologist - except, apparently Gary Kleck - will tell you that witness statements are notoriously unreliable.

That's not pseudoscience - it's just bad science.

Boru