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 control of an unclaimed territory by occupying it. This "terra nullius" principle was used to justify colonization of much of the world, as exemplified in the competition for influence within Africa by the European powers (see Scramble for Africa). The concept was applied even where there were indigenous peoples residing in what Europeans considered newly discovered land, as in Australia. 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