Eckhard Bick - VISL

hemisphere membership 218 , - ‘SWIM’, ‘WALK’, ‘FLY’, for instance, cover different
meaning ranges of ±MOVE. Different animal prototypes, ‘fish’, ‘mammal’, ‘bird’,
‘duck’, all belong in the same quadrant of a two-dimensional universe with the coordinates
of ±LIVE and ±MOVE, but their “meaning bubbles” still have different
positions and shapes. For example, there is a partial overlap between ‘bird’ and ‘duck’
since both fly and walk, but a prototypical bird doesn’t swim.
The multidimensional prototype bubbles as well as any word sense bubble can be
projected onto semantic landscapes with fewer dimensions, even one-dimensional and
two-dimensional, like the shadow of a balloon hovering over a sun-lit plane, or in front
of a vertical cliff. The concept of minimal distinction criteria is about comparing
balloons of different shape and position in as flat a universe as possible (i.e. with the
fewest possible dimensions). The trick is simply about which projection to choose: a
round and a vertically cigar-shaped balloon will yield the same circular shadow on the
plane, but different shadows on the cliff side. Likewise, quadrant-size balloons flying
on top of each other (like the ones for ‘SWIM’, ‘WALK’ and ‘FLY’ on the ‘MOVE’
axis) will blend their square shadows on the plane (e.g., expressing ‘+LIVE’ and
‘+CONCRETE’), but be distinguishable by form and/or position against the cliff side
(‘MOVE’).
218 Any feature could, of course, be expressed as its own dimension, if one so chooses, i.e ±swim etc., but this does not
appear to be a “cost-effective” method, if these features do not have independent combination patterns with other
dimensions.
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