What Does Conformity Mean

Not to mention, we are conditioned to think one way and to give meaning to something based on what the relative agreement is. Along with the common agreement of a society, laws and rules tell what things should mean to us and not what they actually do, given that such rules are created from the mind and hold no reality only consistency. However, it is through language and agreement that we have focused on things as they are, opposed to what they are not, or in other words meaning as denotative meaning or what is meant to represent. For example, Todorov in the hand out states that “The fundamental feature of our whole civilization remains this conception of language-as-shadow whose forms may change but which are nonetheless the direct consequences …show more content…
For example, the word human, we have strayed away from the idea of what it is to be human and rather we have become the word human in that its meaning defines the concept rather than the concept creating the meaning. Jostein Gaarder in his novel Sophie’s World conveys that we have become conformists, he writes “ ‘Today we would probably use the word ‘conformity’; that is when everybody ‘thinks’ and ‘believes in’ the same things without having any deeper feeling about it’ ” which I would agree (378). We think, at least in the major population, that everything is figured out and stray away from questioning. In other words, we have accept things as they are, and not try to understand what they are not and figure out what they mean to the individual; we have become dogmatic in that we no longer question things. Todorov, gives an example of how we have conditioned individuals as they grow to think that what appear to be true is true, he states that “[t]he concept of verisimilitude is no longer fashionable. We no longer find it in ‘serious’ scientific literature; on the other hand, it continues to thrive in second-rate commentaries. In school editions of the classics, in pedagogical practice.” (Todorov, 81). That being said, the young are becoming conditioned to believe that what they see is true even if it only appears to be true but it is not. Moreover, the consciousness of the generation has become infiltrated with what “is” and not what “should”. In the hand out “What Is meaning?” it argues how the “[c]onsciousness is a social product. It is not only not the special field of autonomous man, it is not within range of a solitary man” (What is man? 337). Regarding meaning, our meaning then has become what others want it to become, which as a result we