Testimony is Evidence

[Ravenshire]

No. Intended or not, this is straw.  It goes more like this:

1. Witness testimony is demonstrably unreliable.  (Innocent misremembering due to the falliable nature of human memory, as I mentioned in the post you quoted above, is only one of many factors that contribute to erroneous witness testimony.)

2. Therefore, I and any other rational person, in the interest of reason and truth, should wait for corroborating evidence before believing any claim beyond the most mundane, where being wrong in that belief carries little to no serious consequences.  And, especially before believing claims of the "supernatural" variety, which carry far-reaching and deep-seeded consequences such as the defining of one's world views, and the ways in which we value our lives, and the lives of others.

There's that relevant context you were talking about.  😉

I see the problem now.

1. "Witness testimony is demonstrably unreliable." You are taking all witness testimony as a whole and applying to it the fact that some testimony is unreliable. This is an excellent example of the fallacy of composition. This premise is obviously fallacious because some amount of testimony is reliable. 

2. I have no problem with this. However often the only corroborating evidence is more testimony. As I have stated elsewhere in this thread, billions of events every day happen where there is no lasting physical evidence that can be examined. 

3. Your syllogism collapsed because the first premise is a fallacy. So we are back to mine -- tell me where I erred:

     1' A witness's recollection could be wrong
     2' The witness's character, cognitive ability, subject knowledge, experiences, and track record serve can minimize the possibility of error
     3 The context of the event can minimize the possibility of error
     4 Therefore the reliability of testimony varies depending on the witness and the context

You do nothing more than make your arguments irrelevant by doing nothing more than re-asserting it. Show some actual evidence that testimony is reliable, especially in the face of all the cases where testimony got someone convicted and physical evidence got them exonerated.