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Abstract
Both Umberto Eco and Charles S. Peirce have been concerned with the notion of background knowledge. Eco refers to background knowledge as the encyclopedia; Peirce's term of reference is collateral experience. The aim of this article is to investigate the degree to which these two concepts are comparable. We focus on one major metaphysical issue, viz. the fact that Eco defines collateral experience, which is the first step in any process of cognition, as private, whereas Peirce, as a realist, would never accept the concept of private thoughts, feelings, etc. We suggest that freeing collateral experience from its nominalistic nomenclature makes possible a comparison and synthesis of Eco's and Peirce's conceptions when seen from the perspectives of their cognitive type, nuclear type, and molar content.

According to fiscal illusion theory, voters misperceive fiscal parameters because of incomplete information. The costs of public services are underestimated, implying that if voters had full information, their support for public services would drop. The literature has focused on testing the implications of fiscal illusions, whereas the question why fiscal illusions occur at all has received less attention. According to the standard argument, individuals base their opinion of policy proposals on a valuation of benefits and costs. We formalize the standard argument and show that it is a special case of the attention model of fiscal illusion. In this model, opinion depends on the saliency of attributes of the proposal. We show that the attention model can better explain fiscal illusion by deriving competing hypotheses, which are tested in a survey experiment. We conclude that the mechanism behind fiscal illusion is attention and framing, not incomplete information.