CONCEPT
Mentalities
The Annales concept for the habits of thought and frameworks of perception that structure what members of a civilization can and cannot imagine — the deepest layer of cognitive inheritance, and the scale at which AI is quietly reshaping human cognition.
The history of mentalities (histoire des mentalités) is the Annales School's most ambitious methodological extension — the attempt to reconstruct not what historical actors believed but what they were equipped to believe. Mentalities are the inherited cognitive frameworks — the categories, the analogies, the unquestioned assumptions — that operate beneath explicit belief, shaping what can be thought, what can be said, what can be perceived as a problem at all. Developed by Febvre in his study of sixteenth-century unbelief and extended by Le Roy Ladurie, Duby, and Ariès, the concept applies with special force to the AI transition, which is reshaping mentalities faster than explicit beliefs can keep pace.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Mentalities operate at the deepest timescale — the longue durée of cognitive inheritance. A mentality can persist for centuries, transmitted through language, institutions, child-rearing, and daily practice. Individuals within a civilization typically cannot see their own mentalities; these