Investigation Versus Advocacy, an Unsettled Tension

The founding name of Kurtz's committee contained a promise: it would investigate claims of the paranormal. Almost immediately there was disagreement about whether it did. An early episode over a statistical study of astrology, in which the committee's own handling of the data was criticised by members and one prominent member resigned over it, established a pattern that recurred: an organisation constituted to test claims found that its public identity and its funding both rested on refuting them, and those are not the same activity.

Critics inside the movement, as well as parapsychologists outside it, argued that the group functioned as an advocacy body with an investigative vocabulary. Kurtz's own position was that scepticism means proportioning belief to evidence rather than denying claims in advance, and he repeated it often; whether the institution he built lived up to it is a fair question and one that the organisation has periodically asked itself. The committee dropped the reference to the paranormal from its name in 2006, becoming the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, in part to signal a wider remit. Kurtz left the organisations he had founded in 2010 after a dispute over their direction, and died two years later.