Reduction: The Tie to Reality by Gary Hull

[bert]

Reduction: The Tie to Reality by Gary Hull lectures on one of the key aspects of objectivity. I had a pretty good understanding of it from OPAR but the lecture helped with some of the concepts. In the lecture Gary Hull mentioned that a surprising amount of people he talked to did not understand it correctly. Many people equated reduction with concretizing or essentializing which is not the same as reduction. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff has a very good section on it and that what I'd recommend primarily studying. I'm not sure if this lecture is a good starting point. Some of the examples were unfinished and not clear to me. For instance Gary Hull began reducing a higher level conclusion by tracing it back down to reality through its premises. The problem I had was the example he gave didn't make much sense to me and was not traced all the way back to reality. He just said that one would have to finish retracing it to validate the conclusion, but I think it would have been more helpful if he would have done so himself. On the other hand, I did get something from this example. This process was mentioned in OPAR but this lecture helped me realize that the process of reduction is applied to conclusions much like concepts. Truthfully, the parts of the lecture that seemed to help me the most closely resembled passages in OPAR. Alternating back in forth between the lecture and OPAR helped me understand some of it better.

Overall the lecture helped me realize the need to reduce not only concepts but conclusions. It was also helpful in showing some of the problems that reduction solves. The main problem I had with it was a lack of real clear examples such as Leonard Peikoff's reduction of "friends" in OPAR.

As a note, there are some experienced Objectivist who have complained about the clarity of this lecture. I have been studying Ayn Rand's nonfiction for about 1 year so I haven't had much experiences with different lectures. It sounds like there are better sources to learn about reduction though. I know one good source is OPAR.