Resumen de Adaptation, mortification, and social reform
This essay treats two contemporary examples of scientistic rhetoric, those of B. F. Skinner and Jeremy Rifkin, to demonstrate that their rhetoric is characteristic of institutional rhetoric. This thesis is developed by examining the concept of “adaptation” as a fundamental principle of human motivation in the contemporary scientific worldview and critically treating the use of this concept in Skinner and Rifkin's motivational theories. The criticism argues that these authors’ uses of “adaptation” in their schemes of social reform operate in ways remarkably similar to the religious concept of “mortification,” and that Kenneth Burke's analysis of this concept in the institutional rhetoric of religion is helpful in understanding the importance of “adaptation” in scientistic rhetoric.
