 Nulius in Verba is the motto of the British Royal Society. It means, roughly, take no one's word for it. Always check for yourself. This is still the motto of the British Royal Society, and it has been for centuries. It expresses a certain kind of receiver virtue. A receiver virtue that's related to skepticism against authority, against the testimony of others. It's a receiver virtue that involves being curious for oneself, being intellectually autonomous and courageous, not being willing to take someone else's word for something, but always insisting on checking oneself. And this is a very important part of what it means to be a good scientist. Not to just receive the authority of others, but to always engage in empirical inquiry and observation. However, in recent years and decades, there's become a problem with this sort of attitude about scientific inquiry. You see here a headline from the journal Nature, which says that a physics paper recently set a record with more than 5,000 authors credited, some of them deceased. This paper was published by researchers at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, and the Large Hadron Collider is such a huge operation that no single person could possibly operate it either in practical terms or in terms of expertise. There's just far too much going on for a single person to be able to take no one's word for how the thing works. And this relates to what in philosophy of science is known as the problem of underdetermination. We might have this idea, in fact we do have this idea, that what science does is it articulates theories that make empirical predictions and then we check those predictions. If the predictions are true, we hold on to the theory at least for now, but if the predictions are false, we have to reject the theory. The thing is that that's not exactly how it works. You might think that whenever your prediction doesn't come true, as a scientist you have to be responsible and reject the theory, but actually a theory on its own never makes predictions. Only a theory combined with a methodology and some background assumptions makes empirical predictions. And that means that when an empirical prediction turns out to be false, you don't have to reject the theory. You might instead say that there was something wrong with the methodology or with the background assumptions. Here's another headline about the Large Hadron Collider. It reports that a weasel caused it to shut down when the weasel tunneled into some of the electrical equipment that was involved with running the Large Hadron Collider, which is located near Geneva in the Swiss Alps. So if an observation were being made when this weasel came through and the empirical prediction that the theory combined with the methodological and background assumptions made turned out not to be true, we might say that the scientists were quite reasonable in saying, well, we're going to hold on to our theory for now because we have a good reason to say that there was something wrong with the methodology, namely the Large Hadron Collider wasn't working as it was expected to because there was a weasel that got involved. Instead, scientists can always say that there's something wrong with the background assumptions. They might say that there was an earthquake going on or they might say that there was a lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse and that this somehow had an effect on the observation that was being made. What this indicates though is that one can always say that the theory is true even in the face of literally any empirical observation as long as one comes up with a way of modifying the methodology and the background assumptions that makes the conjunction of the theory methodology and background assumptions consistent with the empirical observation. And that suggests that there must be some kind of epistemic virtues probably to do with communication and collaboration that help us decide what to do in which case. Otherwise, science becomes indistinguishable from faith. So this means that in addition to the virtues of intellectual autonomy and curiosity that I mentioned before, collaborations in science need the virtues of trust, intellectual humility, intellectual courage but of a different sort that allows oneself to be dependent on others and to trust them and intellectual perseverance to keep working even when one's empirical predictions turn out to be false.