ATTITUDES, VALUES AND RELATED CONCEPTS: A SYSTEM OF CLASS IFICATION.

The article focuses on conceptual confusion on terms such as attitudes, beliefs, norms, opinions, sentiments and values and attempts to dispel the appearance of conceptual confusion by offering a system of classification of subjective outlook terminology that may be consistently applied in all the social sciences. Constructing classification systems is a difficult task, for one must constantly balance the complexity of the surrounding world against the simplicity of description needed to understand it. This task is particularly acute when dealing with the almost overwhelming intricacies of human worldview and the classification of outlook according to hierarchy, tripartite content and appetitive-normative orientation represents an attempt to walk this thin line between over-complexity and over-simplicity. The main contribution of this paper lies not in the introduction of new concepts or in the discovery of new principles, for the ideas presented here are largely derived from the scholars quoted and cited.