 Before looking at approaches to answering the epistemic justification question, mention should be made of two positions in the literature which do not fall squarely into either the pragmatic or epistemic camp. The first position, associated primarily with Quine, argues that parsimony carries with it pragmatic advantages and that pragmatic considerations themselves provide rational grounds for discriminating between competing theories (Quine 1966, Walsh 1979). The Quinean position bases an answer to the second question on the answer to the first, thus blurring the boundary between pragmatic and epistemic justification. The second position, due to Sober, rejects the implicit assumption in both the above questions that some global justification of parsimony can be found (Sober 1988, 1994). Instead Sober argues that appeals to parsimony always depend on local background assumptions for their rational justification. Thus Sober writes: