Street Epistemology - Practice

[curiosne]

This is an important point.

Hypothetically, if you were to claim you had a pet dog, I would take you at your word. Plenty of people do, it is pretty commonplace.

If you claimed to have a pet zebra, that might prompt a few follow on questions since, while possible, it would be unusual.

OTOH, if you claimed to have a pet unicorn then I would require a much higher evidential bar to be set.

1) How do you justify raising the evidential bar?
2) Shouldn't the reasons in one case, yield a similar result in a similar situation?
3) If you can shift the bar, for what is reasonable, how do you determine where to stop?

To answer your questions on this:
1) Would the "evidential" bar not be raised the more out of the ordinary a claim is? Assessing what is ordinary and what is not though is subjective.
2) No, only if the cases are similar. When a case becomes more out of the ordinary (eg a Zebra is not ordinary), then heresay is not sufficient evidence. Would you agree with this?
3) You stop when you are subjectively satisfied that there is sufficient evidence for you to verify the claim in question. However, I personally don't stop here as my logic could be impaired so I usually go and ask others whether I am thinking right on analysing the evidence of the claim (obviously this claim should be incredulous for me to ask for someone else's opinion).