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What you're pointing out is that getting at the truth can be hard work, that we must go about this work deliberately, that we aren't guaranteed success and that this insight needs to be applied to any particular question such as the ones you point out in #1 and #3. Objectivism doesn't dispute any of this. We all might hope rationalistically that a single breakthrough will do the job once and for all and make any further intellectual effort automatic, but this hope is in vain. If you can read and write you've made these efforts yourself, and I wish you the best at your further adventures.

Discovery asked: The category possible. Oism holds that the categories of evidence are possible, probable and certain. The arbitrary is not an evidentiary status but the lack of one.

Anyhow, what I was working on saying a few hours ago and sumpin' came up is that a floating abstraction is a consequence of “primacy of the word” epistemology, so as noted in OPAR p. 96 “A floating abstraction is not an integration of factual data; it is a memorized linguistic custom representing in the person's mind a hash made of random concretes, habits, and feelings that blend imperceptibly into other hashes which are the content of other, similarly floating abstractions”. They tend to predominate in academic circles (thus science and philosophy); ordinarily, people don’t talk that way unless they're trying to be deep. Some examples from lit-crit would be “text”, “voice”, “gender”, “hegemony”. Of course, this stuff infiltrates into philosophy. An ancient technical term of linguistics, “generative”, became meaningless non-referential syllable-soup when it was unleashed on the general public. I think, based on all of the examples of how e.g. Peikoff and Rand have used the expression, that it refers to the vagarification of words that did have referents. But "government" is often a floating abstraction to people who don't know what the government really is; the same is true of "law" -- what the heck is "the law"?

They are meaningful, but the referents are imaginary. Concepts of imaginations are derivative concepts - they pertain to a (mental) re-arrangement of reality. Then you are unsure. But you phrased the question in exactly the right form: not, does it have a referent? But, does the referent exist, or is the thing it refers to an imagination or an error? Thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify those points.

Don't worry - you're asking the right questions, which means your confusion won't last very long if you remain honest and active minded. Let me take your questions one by one. First, let's be clear: the meaning of a concept is not its definition. The meaning of a concept is the things in reality it denotes, i.e., the meaning of a concept is its referents, including all their attributes. For example, your concept "book" means all books that have ever existed, that exist, and that will exist, including all their characteristics, even the one's you don't know and will never know. This is true even though you will only encounter a small number of books in your lifetime. You know the meaning of a concept if you can identify its referents. A definition is a condensation of all that information into a retainable "label" that enables you to hold your concepts by naming the essential distinctive attributes of the units they refer to. So, for example, I form the concept "book," and then retain that concept with a definition: "a written or printed work with pages bound along one side." Let me stress: the definition is not the meaning of the concept: the meaning of the concept is actual books. The definition is our way of retaining the concept. We can now answer your question: yes, even if we know the definition of a concept, we can still hold the concept as a floating abstraction. What, then, must one do to ensure that one's concepts aren't floating? Or, in your words: You have to re-trace the process of formulating the definition, as if you were the first one to formulate it. A definition we get from someone else, even a good one, is useless unless we go through the same steps the person who formed it did. A definition we get from someone else I like to call a "pointer" because all it does before we make it our own is point us toward its referents. It says, "By this concept, I mean those things." To grasp the concept, you have to actually look at "those things." Then you have to retrace the definition-formation process (see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology if you have any questions on how to do that, particularly Chapter 5. Then, if you still have questions, raise them here.) There's nothing wrong with looking up definitions, but you make the point better than I ever could: if that is all you do, the concept can be nothing more than a memorized string of words. In order to make it a concept tag, i.e., in order for it to be a definition is the proper sense, you have to re-trace the process of formulating it.

Not quite. If it's a floating abstraction, you don't know it. To know something is to see its connection to reality and its relationship to the rest of your knowledge. A floating abstraction is a concept or idea which is, in your mind, cut off from reality, i.e., which you have not reduced to its referents. It stands in your mind as a string of words disconnected from concretes. So, for example, if you say, "A unit is an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members," and then I ask you for an example, and you shrug, the concept "unit" is - for you - a floating abstraction. But let's take a more difficult case. Suppose you do give a couple examples: "This rock is a unit, when regarded as a member of a group of similar existents, such as those rocks over there. And this camera is a unit, when regarded as a member of a group of similar existents, such as your camera, or your shoe (since they both are members of the group "existents")." Then I ask you, "So what?" and you say, "I don't know. Ayn Rand said that's what units were." I would say it's still a floating abstraction, at least to a large extent. An idea, even a true one, cut off from the rest of one's knowledge [that is, not integrated] is necessarily floating. Anyone disagree with that?