Abstract
Object epistemologies focus on questions (‘What’, ‘How’, ‘Why’, ‘What for’) concerning past and present discourses on things, conceptualizations of things, and routinized practices with things. Object epistemologies are the attempt to describe and analyze knowledge about things, the conceptualizations of things inherent in this knowledge, and the relationship between this knowledge about things and epistemic or scientifical practices. From the point of view of object epistemologies, attributions to things expressed in social practice show themselves to be variable, differential, and temporary. The paper introduces the innovative, trans-disciplinary approach called “object epistemologies” and places it in a wider theoretical context. In addition, the paper presents a summary of the other papers in the volume.