What makes logical injustice a “logical” kind of injustice and not just injustice? Is logical injustice reducible to social injustice? The same question was asked, for instance, by Kristie Dotson about epistemic injustice, and her response was that the kinds of injustices Miranda Fricker describes—both epistemic and hermeneutical—are reducible to social injustice, because nothing about the epistemological tools as such need to be changed to rectify them. The kind of epistemic injustice she thinks is irreducible is when the injustice requires a change to the epistemological system that can’t really happen because of the inertia of the system.

In discussions with my students, we proposed that the situation with the trans population represents such a case of irreducible injustice. The injustice comes from the imposition of a binary language of sex that erases trans identities (or silences the expression of trans experiences?), and the injustice is irreducible because the required change is for a more comprehensive language of sex—a change happening at a very slow pace due to resistance to altering the conceptual landscape by dominant groups.

Circling back to logical injustice, I agree with Dotson that it can be seen as a case of irreducible epistemic injustice, but it wouldn’t count as logical injustice. Or if the shortcomings of the conceptual landscape have some logical aspect to the injustice they sustain, it would be reducible to epistemic injustice. It would be reducible because the standards of coherence do not require change. We do not need to change the logic at play, but the concepts available. Replacing a binary conceptual landscape for sex with a spectrum of concepts doesn’t require a change of logic.

However, my primary example of logical injustice is that described by Anne Salmond in Tears of Rangi, where she calls the Christian God an analytic logician. The logical injustice consists in superimposing a "Fregean conceptual space" over a "Koru conceptual space" in a way that generates incoherence. The mere replacement of concepts, I claim, wouldn’t be sufficient to address the injustice. The whole logical landscape of Koru conceptualisation requires its own standards, and guarding coherence for the expression of Māori worldviews isn’t reducible to a conceptual adaptation within a Fregean logical framework of coherence. What makes the injustice logical is the deep logical patterns in the conceptual landscape. Perhaps, like with epistemic injustice, the injustice arises from the inertia of logical standards applied to judge coherence.

References:

Dotson, Kristie. “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression.” Social Epistemology 28, no. 2 (April 3, 2014): 115–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2013.782585.

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice. Oxford University Press, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001.

Salmond, Anne. Tears of Rangi: Experiments across Worlds. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 2017.