A A

This paper argues that Occam's Razor cannot be legitimately applied to adjudicate between empirical and rationalist epistemic frameworks. The common assumption that sense data requires fewer justifications than higher abstract concepts such as Plato's Forms is shown to be unfounded. Both sense data processing and abstract conceptual frameworks rely on an indeterminate number of a priori assumptions, none of which can be self-justified, an instantiation of Agrippa's Trilemma. Since the cognitive load of either framework cannot be quantified, the parsimony criterion Occam's Razor depends on is inapplicable. Furthermore, naturalistic and evolutionary objections are shown to be circularly dependent on the very a priori structures they seek to ground. The paper concludes that rationalism and empiricism are epistemically equivalent in their justificatory burden.