It proposes that every historical period has underlying epistemic assumptions, ways of thinking, which determine what is truth and what is acceptable discourse about a subject, by delineating the origins of biology, economics, and linguistics.

The introduction to the origins of the human sciences begins with detailed, forensic analyses and discussion of the complex networks of sightlines, hidden-ness, and representation that exist in the group painting Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-waiting, 1656) by Diego Velázquez.

Foucault's application of the analyses shows the structural parallels in the similar developments in perception that occurred in researchers' ways of seeing the subject in the human sciences.

[5] The Order of Things (1966) is about the "cognitive status of the modern human sciences" in the production of knowledge — the ways of seeing that researchers apply to a subject under examination.

Foucault's introduction to the epistemic origins of the human sciences is a forensic analysis of the painting Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-waiting, 1656), by Diego Velázquez, as an objet d'art.

[10]The Order of Things concludes with Foucault's explanation of why he did the forensic analysis: Let us, if we may, look for [representation] the previously existing law of that interplay in the painting of Las Meninas.

[11]The critique of epistemic practices presented in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences expanded and deepened the research methodology of cultural history.

[12] Foucault, with his presentation and explanation of cultural shifts in awareness about ways of thinking, prompted the historian of science Theodore Porter to investigate and examine the contemporary bases for the production of knowledge.