Nevertheless, they still have considerable pre-reflective currency, and for all its oddness, Augustine's suggestion that learning is a matter of being reminded of prior acts of direct acquaintance rests upon a set of common sense assumptions.
Perhaps most important of all, both cases clearly allow for and rely upon acts of direct acquaintance, since illumination is, above all, meant to be an account of the conditions necessary for the mind to have direct acquaintance with intelligible objects.
The question we are supposed to ponder is: given that learning is really a matter of being reminded, and given that all such occasions of being reminded depend upon acts of direct acquaintance wherein we are taught by the things themselves [De Magistro 12.40], what does this imply about our relation to those truths that cannot be accounted for by sense perception?
Intuitively, the prestige of a person does not only depend on the number of acquaintances he has, but also how prestigious his acquaintances are.
Gertler (2001) distinguishes between ordinary demonstratives, which typically involve an intention to pick out an entity that satisfies some description, and a pure demonstrative, which picks out its referent solely by a fundamental act of attention or acquaintance.
Rather than require a further act of awareness, some acquaintance theorists add constraints to the nature of the foundational belief or the manner in which it is formed so that acquaintance with some mental state or mental feature provides part of the content of the belief itself, and does so in such a way as to guarantee the truth of the belief.
Presumably, we will know the latter by acquaintance in the act of grasping propositions in their final analysed forms.
Some acquaintance theorists seem to disagree about the nature of acquaintance.
The distinction lies with the objects of acquaintance.
What about the possibility of acquaintance with ourselves?
