The act of inventing relates to the process of inquiry, to creativity, to poetic and aesthetic invention.

Building on the work of rhetoricians, philosophers, linguists, and theorists in other dis­ciplines, Karen Burke LeFevre challenges a widely-held view of rhetorical invention as the act of an atomistic individual. She proposes that invention be viewed as a social act, in which individuals in­teract dialectically with society and culture in dis­tinctive ways.

Even when the primary agent of invention is an individual, invention is pervasively affected by rela­tionships of that individual to others through lan­guage and other socially shared symbol systems. LeFevre draws implications of a view of invention as a social act for writers, researchers, and teachers of writing.

Applying interactionist discourse theory to show how we create novel beliefs

Inventive Intercourse: From Rhetorical Conflict to the Ethical Creation of Novel Truth offers a theory of discursive interaction, illustrating how we can understand human communication without resorting to the notion of language. Using the perspective of interactionist discourse theory, author Stephen Yarbrough investigates how we create novel beliefs, beliefs we could not have inferred from our established beliefs.

The volume considers a central dilemma of post-modern thought: If language is a system of conventions and rules that limit what we can say and think, how can we deliberately produce anything truly novel? While postmodernism concludes that linguistic and conceptual change within our incommensurable worlds is driven by contingency and blind mechanical forces, Yarbrough argues that this view is wrong because the notion that language mediates our perception is wrong.

Beginning with philosopher Donald Davidson’s assertion that "there is no such thing as language" in the sense of a system of conventions and rules, Yarbrough develops an interactionist theory of discourse and uses it to revise the major elements of Aristotelian rhetoric to explain how we deliberately invent novel concepts that we come to believe.

Yarbrough suggests that all conceptual change is initiated by a shift in our ethical apperception of elements of a situation and that an ethical change will have emotional consequences. Changes in our emotional responses to things will change the ways we interact with them, he says, and changes in our interaction with things will create new technical relations which we can communicate to others only by altering our habitual shared way of using signs, metaphors, and other tropes.

In this first sustained critique of current-traditional rhetorical theory, Sharon Crowley uses a postmodern, deconstructive reading to reexamine the historical development of current-traditional rhetoric. She identifies it (as well as the British new rhetoric from which it developed) as a philosophy of language use that posits universal principles of mind and discourse. Crowley argues that these philosophies are not appropriate bases for the construction of rhetorical theories, much less guides for the teaching of composition. She explains that current-traditional rhetoric is not a rhetorical theory, and she argues that its use as such has led to a misrepresentation of invention.

Crowley contends that current-traditional rhetoric continues to prosper because a considerable number of college composition teachers—graduate students, part-time instructors, and teachers of literature—are not involved in the development of the curricula they are asked to teach. As a result, their voices, necessary to create any true representation of the composition teaching experience, are denied access to the scholarly conversations evaluating the soundness of the institutionalized teaching methods derived from the current-traditional approach.