Martin Gardner (1914–2010) was a famous writer and philosopher of science, and Marcello Truzzi (1935–2004) was trained in sociology. Both had backgrounds in magic, giving them intimate knowledge of how people can be tricked and believe things unsupported by evidence. Both were founders of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) in 1976, but Truzzi soon left and founded his own journal, The Zetetic Scholar (not to be confused with The Zetetic, which became the Skeptical Inquirer). Much of their correspondence, collected and published for the first time in Dear Martin, Dear Marcello, is about Gardner’s disapproval of what Truzzi published, which he thought conferred too much respectability to nonsense, while Truzzi criticized what he saw as CSICOP’s debunking stance, which he considered to be in breach of its declared position of not dismissing anything without full evaluation.
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About Skeptical Inquirer
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