> probably borrowed the term from behavioral scientists
It's from epistemology. It is not there to refer to the subjective but to the objective.
> A similar thing happened to "object oriented" which has been misused by philosophers and visual artists alike
For instance?
In the 1990s "Object-Oriented Ontology" was introduced by Graham Harman [1]. The name was borrowed from computing, but its meaning has little or nothing to do with Simula or Smalltalk.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Harman
This is very interesting especially in the terms of what I think some call a "rabbit hole",
but we could be curious on how and why you saw misuse.
The OOO/"Speculative Realism" crowd are loony charlatans who make the current post-modern neo marxist politburo who runs the humanities parts of academia look downright sane.
My response to unironic OOO believers is that we must wage war on objects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistentialism