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
Mike Sutton (criminologist) to conclude that "even by the turn of the twentieth century errors in earlier measurements were readily apparent without the need to invoke decimal places." In 2014, Sutton published a non-peer reviewed e-book, "Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret", alleging that Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace plagiarised the theory of natural selection from Scottish grain merchant and arboriculturist Patrick Matthew. Matthew had published "On Naval Timber and Arboriculture" in 1831, twenty-eight years before Darwin's "On the Origin of Species". Darwin biographer James Moore declared it a "non-issue", and said that "I would be extremely surprised if there was any new