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
Terra nullius who claims that in the 15th and 16th century, European writers adopted the "res nullius" concept for territorial conquest. Frost writes: Historians debate whether "first discovery and effective occupation" was applied to territory inhabited by indigenous people that European empires sought to acquire or not. According to Frost: On the other side of the debate are historians which claim that "terra nullius" is a much younger concept, which did not become formalized before the end of the 19th century. Historian Merete Borch writes: These historians claim instead that territorial conquest was justified from natural law — that which has no