ABSTRACT
The use of the notion of a range of attention as a factor in an interrogative inquiry is seen to be both natural and apt to bring out an important feature of interrogative processes in general. One first task is thus to incorporate the notion of tacit knowledge in the interrogative model. The problem of knowledge representation arises in many different ways. Philosophers know it best as a problem concerning the nature of knowledge, especially its logic and semantics. It is also a problem in computer science, especially perhaps in database theory. What is crucial is that the optimal way of activating information depends on what is known about the structure and contents of the database and not just on the hardware where it is stored. In a sense the crucial question knows what information there is in a given database, that is, what the database “knows.”
