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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.

The article focuses on the author's comment on the paper "The Effect of Organization Size Upon Normative Diversity," by D. Michael Betz, that appeared in the March 1972 issue of the journal "Social Science Quarterly." Conceptually, the norm construct is weakened to the point of triviality by reasoning that "where two or more individuals share a perspective or attitude such shared perspectives represent a normative environment for those individuals and other individuals in their midst." In standard usage, the norm concept has reference to widely shared sets of beliefs regarding appropriate behavior where these beliefs are not only shared but believed to be shared and are supported by social mechanisms encouraging conformity. Betz has examined attitude diversity, not norm diversity and has shown that with respect to three questions, diversity of attitudes is more common in large organizations than in small. Only Betz's unfortunate definition of the norm concept permits labeling these attitudes norms.

The article presents notes on a research paper related to the analysis of public policy in the U.S. According to the author, this recent analysis is a most useful and needed clarification of a very emotion charged issue within the social sciences. In this study the researcher identifies a certain dialectical process which takes place between paradigms, as perceptions of social problems in terms of Paradigm II are translated into actions which fit the available technology of Paradigm I, and then lose their effectiveness by blaming the victim. The difficulty for the program planner or administrator is that there is no acceptable institutionalized thought structure, specifically, there is no belief-value system on which to base action within the second paradigm. Something more is involved than finding a satisfactory belief-value basis with which to induce a large qualitative change in social structure. The author remarks that within political science the challenge to empiricism for its own sake has been clearly made on the precise ground that much of its research outcomes are socially irrelevant.