Actitudes y discurso reconstructs the attitude concept from an apparently internal psychological property into a historically variable and socially consequential practice of evaluation. The text’s key move is to shift attention from what people supposedly “have in their heads” to what evaluations accomplish in situated language. Discursive approaches treat attitudes as positions enacted through talk, rather than as stable predispositions awaiting measurement. This theoretical reorientation also foregrounds ideology, power and institutional effects: discourse is analysed not only for what it represents but for what it authorises, normalises or excludes. Methodologically, the text links conceptual history to discourse analysis, showing how competing definitions of attitude imply different models of the person, knowledge and social reality. Its wider significance lies in connecting social psychology with critical discourse studies and governmentality: evaluative language becomes a mechanism through which subjects and social objects are stabilised. The work therefore makes discursivity operational without reducing discourse to rhetoric alone.
