We have been thinking lately about how many dimensions a semantic dictionary should have. Some researchers at Carnegie-Mellon have been approaching the same question from the perspective of neuroscience and real-time imaging of activity in the human brain while understanding language (http://bit.ly/buIZEx).

According to CMU, there are really only THREE basic semantic dimensions: (1) Can I eat it? (2) Can I pick it up? (3) Can I hide in it? Admittedly, this primitive partitioning of the world probably goes back to our primate origins, but does have a certain resonance. Let’s remember it the next time we try to categorize journal articles in nanotechnology or search postings on someone’s Facebook wall.