 Fundamental to both developments, however, is the institution of human speech and the rules that make it effective, or possible (DJN IV.1; Hochstrasser 2000). For without speech in the sense of symbolic communication human sociality would remain at a primitive and unsustainable level, in that the terms of human cooperation could not be articulated and agreed upon. Conversely – and hinting at the general providentialism that Pufendorf substitutes for traditional metaphysical teleology – speech, or the communication of thought to others via sound, would be “of hardly any use” without a social life (DJN IV.1.1). Unlike natural signs or associations (e.g., dawn, smoke, groans), speech is an artificial construct of humans over time: learned rather than congenital, and arbitrary or accidental instead of naturally uniform, it is a clear instance of the willful imposition of moral entities upon the world so as to give rise to new obligations. (DJN IV.1.4–5) Its utility depends upon consent (tacit or express) and on the concomitant requirements of consistency and veracity, which are both instrumentally and – insofar as humans are obligated to be social – morally necessary. However, though humans are bound by the general conventions of language and by the requirement of not lying to one another, they retain a certain flexibility of action based on others’ varying right to know one’s thoughts, and the actual consequences of such revelations. Thus Pufendorf distinguishes between lies (mendacia) and untruths (falsiloquia) and also allows for noninjurious deceptions (DJN IV.1.9). This proviso applies not only to everyday life and its “harmless arts of simulation and dissimulation,” but also to the realm of politics and international relations, where total candor or naivete may be counterproductive and defeat the injunctions of sociality (DJN IV.1.17; Martin 2009). Pufendorf returns to it repeatedly in discussing the duties of (esp. contemporary) historians (Seidler 1997, Piirimäe 2008). 