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
Verba volant, scripta manent Verba volant, scripta manent Verba volant, scripta manent is a Latin proverb. Literally translated, it means "spoken words fly away, written words remain". This apparently much older anonymous proverb seems to have been quoted in a speech of the Emperor Titus to the Roman Senate; the general meaning is that spoken words might easily be forgotten but written documents can always be relied on for conclusive proof. The legal meaning could be an extension of the usage of the old proverb. A related meaning is that if two people want to establish a formal agreement about something, it is better