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
Glossary of ancient Roman religion and legal usage, "verba concepta" ("preconceived words") were verbal formulas that could be adapted for particular circumstances. Compare "verba certa", "fixed words." Collections of "verba concepta" would have been part of the augural archives. Varro preserves an example, albeit textually vexed, of a formula for founding a "templum. In the legal sense, "concepta verba" (the phrase is found with either word order) were the statements crafted by a presiding praetor for the particulars of a case. Earlier in the Roman legal system, the plaintiff had to state his claim within a narrowly defined set of fixed phrases "(certa verba)"; in