Since the mental products of conceptual gerrymandering do not represent full mental integration of one's experience, they should not properly be called "concepts" at all. In earlier pages they have been termed "pseudo-concepts"; Rand calls them "anti-concepts." Psychologist X's notion of "assertiveness" (pp. 1.3:30-1) provides a good illustration. This vague notion embraced a disparate mix of assertive and aggressive behaviors, which were fundamentally different from each other, stemmed from opposite sources, and possessed no common attribute to differentiate them in kind from other behaviors. In political discourse the term "rights" is often associated with a similar assortment of desiderata—dissimilar, often conflicting goals, deriving not from any objective investigation of human life and action but from the emotional prejudices of a particular speaker or writer.

Even when concepts are objectively formulated, "borderline cases" may occasionally occur. In such instances rational people may disagree as to which concept subsumes a given unit. Such exceptional cases, however, do not negate or undermine the basic validity of a concept. For instance, the concept of "corpse" is cognitively valid, representing entities different in kind from both living bodies and from inorganic matter—even though it may be impossible to specify the exact point at which remains become so decayed that they should no longer be classified as a corpse.