Beyond Empiricism

Argentine Rolando García was one of the earliest world-leading specialists on climate change. Forced to leave his country after the 1966 military coup, García became a nomadic thinker, living in various countries and moving from the study of the atmosphere to addressing larger questions of epistemology. In collaboration with Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, García developed a “theory of complex systems” (TCS) to model and understand social behaviours in uncertain, nonlinear milieus. This chapter discusses García’s TCS as not just an epistemological but also an ontological turning point in the production of knowledge in Latin America. It also describes García’s role in the rise of socio-cybernetic research, an arguably post-humanist area of study and practice that effectively imagines new “modes of existence” on the basis of an ecological and non-empiricist theory of knowledge.