blicket

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.

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 […]

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blicket

1. second-person plural subjunctive I of blicken