The Shadow Biosphere Hypothesis
Non-knowledge in Emerging Disciplines
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5337170 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Valentina Marcheselli (0000-0002-8396-3544, Department of Philosophy, University of Milan—La Statale, Italy, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 636-658 |
| Publication date | 2020-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Science Technology & Human Values (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0162-2439 • E-ISSN: 1552-8251 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0162243919881207 |
| OpenAlex | W2981929379 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 43 |
All life on Earth shares the same ancestor, the most primitive form of life that arose, in still unknown circumstances, more than 3.5 billion years ago. At least this is what is commonly assumed. Astrobiologists have revisited this assumption and advanced the hypothesis of the existence of a "shadow biosphere" on Earth: a parallel tree of life whose instances, being different at the molecular level to the kind of life we are used to, would remain hidden from view. In this paper, I take the emergence of the so-called shadow biosphere hypothesis and the controversial discovery of GFAJ-1, a microbe thriving in the arsenic-rich waters of Mono Lake, as an entry point to look into the strategic role of non-knowledge claims. I juxtapose the Latourian black-box, that is, those undiscussed technoscientific artifacts that are taken for granted in scientific practice, with the shadowy nature of non-knowledge claims in order to pay closer attention to the contingent, active, performative, and always social nature of the making of what is unknown. I conclude this paper by claiming that in the negotiation of what is unknown, emerging disciplines position themselves within the larger scientific community
Ancestor · Archaeology · Biology · Biosphere · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Negotiation · Performative utterance · Social science · Sociology · Sociology of scientific knowledge · Thriving · Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution · History · Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology · Philosophy · Psychology · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life · Ecology
Science in action
Ignorance and Uncertainty
Biographies of scientific objects
Epistemological issues in the study of microbial life
Risk as zombie category
Pharmaceutical Controversies and the Performative Value of Uncertainty
Essential Tensions
Artefacts of not-knowing
Repertoires
Varieties of Ignorance
Experimental Method and Spontaneous Generation
Toward a Social Theory of Ignorance
Risk society
Agnotology
Scientific Nonknowledge and Its Political Dynamics
Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science
Secrecy in Three Acts
Extraterrestrial Relativism
Epistemic Cultures
Accounting for Error
The Unknown in Process
Three Fragments From a Sociologist's Notebooks
Strategic unknowns
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2025 (4) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |