Invitational Rhetoric and Persuasion Rhetoric: Aligning Argumentative Influence with Epistemic Agency

This paper advances a unified account of how argumentative influence can align with epistemic agency by reframing the distinction between invitational and persuasion rhetoric. Drawing on Foss and Griffin’s (1995) influential articulation of invitational rhetoric as grounded in equality, immanent value, and self-determination, I argue that invitational communication inherently positions addressees as reason receivers —agents capable of understanding, evaluating, and endorsing reasons through their own rational capacities. In such settings, perspective change, when it occurs, constitutes rational self-persuasion , an internal process grounded in the addressee’s judgment of the speaker’s reasons. Foss and Griffin contrast this with persuasion rhetoric, holding that persuasion aims to modify others’ attitudes and thereby risks producing compliance under influence through pressure amplified by unbracketed power differentials. I contend, however, that this criticism targets only a subset of persuasion: persuasion that is purely uptake-driven. Building on insights from Gearhart (1979), Tindale (1999), and contemporary persuasion theory (e.g., O’Keefe 2016), I defend the rational persuasion thesis, according to which a speaker’s intention to rationally persuade is the intention to have addressees persuade themselves by judging the speaker’s premises to be reasons they themselves have. When persuasion is so understood, the speaker’s intention is inherently aligned with epistemic agency and motivates the creation of rhetorical environments marked by safety, value, and freedom—conditions Foss and Griffin take to be distinctive of invitational rhetoric. I conclude that argumentation respects epistemic agency not by forgoing influence, but by aiming at rational self-persuasion, thereby distinguishing rational from merely causal forms of rhetorical efficacy.