Abstract

In this paper I individuate some important differences between formal inference and material inference and how they affect two different ways of understanding human reasoning. I will claim that understanding reasoning as characterised by formal inference can generate epistemic injustice in education. To explain this claim, I will go through two examples of errors in evaluation. In the first one—the “shelves case” — I will show how epistemic injustice generates oppression because it does not take into account the difference generated by the consideration of individuals as concrete individuals rather than abstract individual or “the generalised other”. I will contend that given the nature of human reasoning, thought is not reducible to "logical" reasoning but rather requires knowledge of conceptual contents. In the second example—the “Backtracking fallacy”—I will contend that a fallacy in assessment procedures may arise from the lack of distinction between the "public" framework of knowledge and individual epistemic states. From what will emerge about the two examples, the importance of the transmission of cultural heritage, in the form of knowledge and content, also as the sets of inferences involving concepts, will be seen. For it becomes necessary to set aside the misleading idea that these legacies are mere conceptual structures that have always been implicitly present in the student’s mind, and that it is sufficient to stimulate the student’s mind to make them explicit.