The February issue of Scientific American had an article on the latest thinking about the Whorfian Hypothesis, which states that language strongly influences how humans think. This was a hot idea about sixty years ago, but eventually fell out of academic favor because of the lack of hard empirical evidence. Now that evidence is starting to show up, which has some implications for computational semantics.
The standard view on language and meaning has recently emphasized universality. This is to say that the understanding of language is hardwired in our heads, and so any competent human should qualify as an expert in the algorithmic delineation of meaning. The Whorfian hypothesis throws us a curve here in that we now have to consider language along with culture in our models of thought. A single well-crafted taxonomy or other semantic construct will not fit all.
We see something of this problem on the Worldwide Web. As Jimmy Wales noted this past week, the content of the Web, and Wikipedia in particular, is largely created by twenty- and thirty-something males and so is dominated by their interests. A set of semantic categories derived from the Web in general will certainly be insufficient for understanding text on finance or on medicine and may be challenged even when dealing with the pages frequented by twenty- and thirty-something females.
This does not mean that a given semantic scheme is invalid. Each scheme, however, is limited by the vocabulary it covers and in the kinds of distinctions that that it makes. That should be good news for those of us who make their living in computational semantics.