Humans rely on social interaction to achieve many important goals. These interactions rely in turn on people's capacity to understand others' mental states: their thoughts and feelings. Do different cultures understand minds in different ways, or do widely shared principles describe how different cultures understand mental states? Extensive data suggest that the mind organizes mental state concepts using the 3d Mind Model, composed of the psychological dimensions: rationality (vs. emotionality), social impact (states which affect others more vs. less), and valence (positive vs. negative states). However, this evidence comes primarily from Englishspeaking individuals in the United States. Here we investigated mental state representation in 57 contemporary countries, using 163 million English language tweets; in 17 languages, using billions of words of text from internet webpages; and across more than 2000 years of history, using curated texts from four historical societies. We quantified mental state meaning by analyzing the text produced by each culture using word embeddings. We then tested whether the 3d Mind Model could explain which mental states were similar in meaning within each culture.We found that the 3d Mind Model significantly explained mental state meaning in every country, language, and historical society that we examined. These results suggest that rationality, social impact, and valence form a generalizable conceptual backbone for mental state representation.

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France today is dominated by the overpowering force of the personality of Charles de Gaulle. In his recent address to the Algerian rebels, de Gaulle was not far wrong in his claim, “I am France.” The French people have called upon de Gaulle to solve the political problems of the nation. He has been given an almost unlimited power to use his own discretion in seeking solutions. The results have ranged from a new Algerian policy to the detonation of atom bombs and the visit of Khrushchev. Despite what one may feel about de Gaulle there can be no doubt that he has given new prestige to a mortally sick France.It was for this reason that he was so little content with the existing party structure of France. It is quite easy to criticize these convictions as illusions. But Mounier had no delusions about the Communist Party. And anyone who agrees with him about the capitalist system which he experienced in France can understand the agonizing dilemma in which he was placed. He chose what in his mind was a path between the two horns of that dilemma.

The paper looks at several episodes in which R. Yirmiyah is rebuked for questions that are portrayed as epistemologically destabilizing to the rabbinic legal project. I argue that R. Yirmiyah is portrayed as a caricature of late rabbinic scholastic thought, and that his characterization enables the writers of the Bavli to hold their own scholastic tendencies up to critique while also drawing protective boundaries around the analytical direction their legal culture has taken. I also read the passages together to demonstrate that the Bavli functions as a unified literary work in previously unacknowledged ways. These episodes form a sort of nonlinear plot, a web of stories that produce a character with his own “history.” There may be no historical rabbinic nuisance named R. Yirmiyah, but there is certainly a constructed literary one, whose reappearance throughout the Talmud plays an important role in working out tensions within the rabbinic legal project.

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