 It is clear in this as well as other discussions how Pufendorf’s anthropological and social realism allows or actually requires a certain flexibility in articulating context-specific obligations of the natural law, even or especially within the particular human institutions created to enact sociality. It is because of this flexibility and consequent slipperiness of language that he goes on to treat of oaths (DJN IV.2) which, presuming “human diffidence, infidelity, ignorance, and impotence” (DJN IV.2.2), are a special means for assuring others (through associated divine or civil sanctions) of the reliability of our speech acts and the promises and pacts that rest thereon. Of course, since oaths themselves involve presumptions and tacit conditions arising from the nature of particular cases (DJN IV.2.14), they too may require further regulation. Thus, like other human institutions based on pacts, the rules of speech both antedate civil sovereignty but come eventually to depend on it in certain ways as well.