Recent work linking feminist epistemology with social epistemology draws attention to the role of status and power in understanding knowledge and reasoning in social context. I argue that considerations of social justice require better understandings of two particular components of reasoning and social context: (i) abstraction—who gets to abstract, how, and why? (ii) the individual-social distinction—how do particular understandings of this distinction serve to minimize or elucidate the role of status and power
