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 and when the "terra nullius" concepts were used. The debate has been especially prevalent in Australia where it was ignited by the history wars caused by the Mabo case in 1992. The history wars caused Australian historians to reevaluate the country's history, the dispossession of Aborigines and whether the land should best be characterized as having been "settled" or "conquered". A part of this debate concerned whether "terra nullius" as a concept was ever used by England and other European powers to justify territorial conquest. On one side of the debate are historians such as Alan Frost and Henry Reynolds