blicket

English

Etymology

Introduced by Nancy Soja in her 1987 dissertation "Ontological Constraints on 2-Year-Olds' Induction of Word Meanings" from MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

The word was used after Soja by a variety of cognitive scientists, and has gained usage since 2000 in publications by David Sobel and Alison Gopnik of the Psychology Department of UC Berkeley.

Noun

blicket (plural blickets)

1. (philosophy) A type of novel object with certain properties that may be categorized by a human in certain experiments relating to causality and perception, e.g., triggering a "blicket detector" (a device that lights up and plays music).
   • 2007 September 1, Daniel A. Weiskopf, “The origins of concepts”, in Philosophical Studies, volume 140, number 3, →DOI:

     So if the child now represents these instances as being blickets, she represents them as being more similar to each other than they seemed previously.

   • 2012, Issues in Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine Research and Practice, page 1627:

     Later they were presented with the picture of a blicket along with the real object it depicted and asked to indicate the blicket. Many of the 24-, 18-, and even 15-month-olds indicated the real object as an instance of a blicket […]

German

Pronunciation

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Verb

blicket

1. second-person plural subjunctive I of blicken