Science Quote by Ruth Hubbard

Hubbard is smuggling a radical claim into the sober cadence of a scientist: reality, as a shared human project, doesn’t simply get discovered; it gets built. Her phrasing starts with the body - “sensations” - then shows how quickly raw experience becomes social material once language “objectif[ies] and categorize[s].” Those verbs are doing ideological work. “Objectify” suggests a necessary violence: we turn the fluid, private mess of perception into stable nouns we can pass around. “Categorize” admits that stability comes with borders, exclusions, and power.

The kicker is “a tradition of what is real.” Not “knowledge,” not “facts,” but tradition - something inherited, curated, and enforced. Hubbard’s intent isn’t to flirt with relativism; it’s to expose the infrastructure behind scientific authority. Scientific “reality” depends on agreed-upon terms, measurement vocabularies, and taxonomies that let one person’s observation align with another’s. If you can’t name it, you can’t argue about it; if you can’t place it “in relation,” you can’t build theory, causality, or consensus.

Context matters: Hubbard was a biologist and a prominent feminist critic of how science naturalizes social hierarchies. Read that way, the line is also a warning. The same linguistic scaffolding that makes cumulative knowledge possible can fossilize bias into common sense. “Tradition” becomes both the engine of progress and the mechanism by which certain versions of reality - often the ones convenient to institutions - get to feel inevitable.