Rebuilding Public Reason in the Age of AI: Rhetorical Citizenship and Critical Doxic Literacy for Higher Education

Abstract: Democracies face a crisis of public reason grounded in a disintegration of shared epistemic ground and amplified by digital polarisation and AI-mediated disinformation. Current pedagogy, focused on deconstructive critique or fact-checking skills, fails to address how algorithmic systems engineer plausibility at scale. Higher education must cultivate discerning judgement alongside critique. Drawing on rhetorical studies, this essay proposes a dual-axis framework for civic pedagogy: Rhetorical Citizenship (ethical communicative agency, coalition-building, and accountable ethos) and Critical Doxic Literacy (mapping tacit belief systems and analysing engineered plausibility). This approach retools classical concepts – eikos (plausibility) and doxa (shared premises) – to navigate hyper-eikotic digital environments where humans and algorithms co-produce a psychological feeling of truth decoupled from empirical reality. Using comparative case studies – Japan’s techno-animism, India’s digital sovereignty, and Brazil’s tiered liability – the essay demonstrates how these competencies operate across distinct governance and cultural contexts. It addresses cognitive, ethical, and social dimensions of learning in an AI-mediated public sphere, preparing graduates to map competing architectures of belief and exercise provisional judgement in conditions of manufactured uncertainty.