Deangelo     1. Someone has come forward claiming to have started the "bigfoot" stories.
                   2. This guy has produced a big wooden foot allegedly used to make the original footprints.
                  (3. People lose confidence in stories when there is evidence of fakery.)                             
                   C. Most people nowadays don't believe in bigfoot.                                           DIRECT

Micah        1. 74 percent of respondents to the Fake-Jamaican Psychics survey asserted belief in Bigfoot
                  2. The Fake-Jamaican Psychics survey included 27 million respondents.
                  3. The Fake-Jamaican Psychics survey was taken two weeks ago.
                 (4.  The Fake-Jamaican Psychics survey respondents were representative of all Americans)    
                  C. 74 percent of Americans believe in Bigfoot.                                                DIRECT

Micah says that Deangelo's data is out of date, but doesn't give any facts to support this, so it's not really an argument. [One way to deal with comments like this is to treat them as arguments, another way is to discuss them in an incidental note, like this. Either way, dealing rationally with such things is a way of possibly gaining a little extra credit.]

Deangelo gives a direct argument
Micah gives a direct argument

Analysis:  Micah bears a bit more burden of proof than Deangelo, but not much. Both make claims about what people believe, and the null hypothesis here is that we don't know what people believe on this issue.

 Deangelo Unknown Argument.                          Micah  Generalization Argument.
                 Bigfoot stories explained away.                     Population: Americans
                                                                                     Sample: Callers to a psychic hotline 
                                                                                     Age: recent
                                                                                     Size: 27,000,000 (about 10% of the American population.)

Evaluation: Notice that the existence of Bigfoot isn't at issue here. What's at issue is what the majority of Americans believe about Bigfoot. (These issues are only tenuously connected. Until this century, Americans who knew about coelacanths believed that living ones no longer existed. Red-sea fishermen knew they did, because they caught and ate coelecanths on a regular basis! Similarly, many people believe in many things that we have good reason to think don't exist.) Deangelo's argument is not based on a sample, so it's not a generalization. Instead, he is relying on a perhaps naive faith that people will pay attention to the available evidence and come to a reasonable conclusion. We have no reason to think that a majority of people think this way, so even if all the bigfoot "sightings" are credibly explained away, that's not enough to guarantee that people who believe in bigfoot will change their minds. Micah's argument is a generalization. It's recent enough, and it is certainly large enough. However, people who call telephone psychics are not guaranteed to be as critical as the general population. In fact, they are likely to belong to that fraction of our society that believes all sorts of things on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. So, after all this, we still don't know what most Americans believe about Bigfoot.

Fallacies: Micah commits hasty generalization (biased sample).
               (Deangelo's argument is also weak, even if his facts are right.)

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