It is natural to think that the meaning of ‘blue’ or of ‘the taste of a pineapple’ is an entity in the world with which we are sometimes acquainted, a color or a taste. For such cases it seems explanatory to say that to know a meaning is to be acquainted with what is meant. The same seems to apply also to proper names such as ‘Scott’; to know what is meant by them, in the “strictest” sense, is to be acquainted with those objects.

But this simple “museum” semantics does not readily extend to most other cases. A friendship and a promise are things that, in some sense, we can be witness to; but it no longer seems explanatory to say that to understand those expressions is to be acquainted with anything in particular. And what is it that we are acquainted with when after reading Jaeger's Paideia we have grasped the sense of that Greek notion? Indeed, the terms whose semantics are not plausibly explained through acquaintance are of both general and singular types.