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
Sidney Verba of political participation by different groups." The great framing question of his work has been, "Whose voice is heard by the government?" Verba himself argues that issues having to do political participation have become central in America's political discourse today; but he attributes his initial interest in the subject to the prescient encouragement of his mentor, Professor Gabriel Almond at Princeton University. Verba earned his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1959; and in 1963, he was named as a co-author with Almond in "The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations." In retirement, he continues to explore his longtime