The testimony of others is fundamental to the way we gain knowledge about the world. One way of analysing this is to see testimony just an ordinary empirical sign of what is testified, reliable in general even if far from infallible. However, critics point out that it is impossible for the individual to check what he is told enough of the time to generated a statistic of this reliability, so testimony needs to have a default title to credit built into it. The issue is made pointed by Hume’s essay on the incredible nature of testimony to the occurrence of miracles. In social epistemology the transmission of information through testimony is crucial, as is the nature of the authority accorded to those who testify.