Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

[RoadRunner79]

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The point is that, were somebody to be with you and claim that a horse or zebra made those tracks, you would not need to first determine whether horses or zebras are possible. It's not an extraordinary claim because it is, itself, supported in some measure. With zebras there would be an additional set of criteria that would need to be fulfilled (are there zebras in the area? If not usually, how did one get here? etc) because that claim is slightly more extraordinary than the baseline experience of your standard western person.

When it comes to unicorns though, now there's a lot more work to do, because the existence of unicorns is not a given, nor are a series of other questions about their characteristics that would need to be asked before we could take the claim that they made hoof prints in this specific area of the world seriously. It is a claim for which none of the basic premises have been demonstrated, making it extraordinary in that it currently contravenes our understanding of the world, and you'd have extra legwork to do getting the claim demonstrated. Hell, even if we did literally find a horse with a horn making those tracks there would be additional investigation needed, both in terms of what was meant by "unicorn" in the original claim, and in terms of the nature of the creature, because they still might not line up right.

Like it or not, there is additional necessary evidence required for extraordinary claims versus mundane ones, because you can't just skip the baseline demonstration of possibility to get to a given conclusion, and you also can't just take a phenomenon as evidence of its cause: you would actually need to demonstrate that any given supernatural claim comes from an actual supernatural cause, and if you had evidence of that it would be extraordinary indeed, and would certainly require more work than regular evidence would.

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I suppose that is where I differ. If the evidence points to a zebra making the prints and eliminates a horse or other animal. I am going to consider that evidence to indicate a zebra is in the area and making those prints (even if a zebra cannot be shown to be in the area). I'm not going to require additional evidence to make that proclamation. Although I may question a single point of evidence in general (we could be mistaken on a single instance, but multiple points of evidence pointing to the same thing is less likely to be in error).

In the case of a unicorn, I am likely going to (similar to yourself), ask how they know it is a unicorn and what they are basing their claims on. And again I am going to look for multiple sources of confirmation. In the case of a horse or zebra, I may be more likely to assume the person knows what they are talking about (given credentials or seeming to be knowledgeable on the subject). It's not that less evidence is required in one instance over the other, rather; I am more willing to make assumptions, and take things on faith.