Philosophy of testimony captured in the motto of the Royal Society – ‘Nullius in verba (no man's word)’. Crudely put, the question is: 'How can testimony give us knowledge when we have no reasons of our own?' Coady suggests that there are two approaches to this problem: and Hume is one of the few early philosophers to offer anything like a sustained account of testimony, this can be found in his "‘An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding’" in the section on miracles. The basic idea is that our justification for believing what people tell us comes from our experience of the ‘...constant and regular
Res nullius Res nullius Res nullius (lit: "nobody's thing") is a Latin term derived from private Roman law whereby "res" (an object in the legal sense, anything that can be owned, even a slave, but not a subject in law such as a citizen nor land) is not yet the object of rights of any specific subject. Such items are considered ownerless property and are free to be acquired by means of "occupatio". Examples of "res nullius" in the socio-economic sphere are wild animals ("ferae naturae") or abandoned property ("res derelictae"). Finding can also be a means of occupation (i.e. vesting ownership),