kinds of mental representations, describing the kinds of relationships opinions have with epistemic and motivational mental objects.

Opinions can be described as configurations of an individual's beliefs, values and feelings that can be conditionally activated. Conditional activation points to the flexible and dynamic nature of these representations that are **not grounded in**
certainty and that usually come out from the merging and elaboration of other representations and attitudes. Opinions are not only conditional, but also compositional. This means that, for instance, starting from my feeling of aversion toward mathematics and as a consequence of having met a rude friend of friends who happened to teach math at school, when asked about my opinion on the time kids should spend in studying mathematics, I can form or, better, activate an opinion according to which the less time they spend the better it is.

Opinions stem from the conditional activation of different kinds of mental representations, that can have a propositional content or, as in the case of attitudes and feelings, they can be more evaluative. However, there is a specific feature that distinguishes an opinion from other kinds of mental objects. An opinion **is an epistemic**
representation in which the truth-value is deemed to be uncertain. **Opinions refer**
to objects of the external world that can not be told to be either true or false. This impossibility (or irrelevance) to say whether the content of a representation is true or false, but only if it makes sense according to what someone believes and knows is what makes a mental representation an opinion. This essential feature accounts for the fact that opinions can be easily influenced not only by social influence, i.e.

an external force, but that they can also be easily revised according to the change in one's own mental representations.

This basic feature can be paired with the presence of an attitude, i.e. an evaluative component that specifies whether the individual likes or dislikes **the topic. In**
general, attitudes are present when the topic is somehow involving for the subject, so he is positively or negatively inclined toward it.

When this is not the case, we have "factual opinions", like in the following example. If someone is required to say when Mozart died, he can know the correct answer or not, but this is not a moot point. On the contrary, the causes of Mozart's death are debatable because without knowing where he was buried it **is impossible** to analyze the bones and to ascertain what killed him. This means that **we know** that Mozart died in 1791 but there are contrasting opinions about the causes of his death, and, even if there exist one true opinion, none can tell which **is the truth.**
On the other hand, when opinions involve also evaluative components **or facts, the** opinions result from the activation of a pattern of related representations like beliefs, knowledge, other opinions, but also goals. This view allows us to describe opinions as non-static patterns of relationships in which different representations are linked through a variety of different linkages. This work is meant to address the origin and changing of opinions thanks to these inter-relationships.