Italian Journal of Health Education, Sports and Inclusive Didactics
DIGITAL COGNITIVE CAPITAL AND GENERATIVE AI: RAG SOCRATE AS A METHODOLOGICAL ENVIRONMENT FOR EPISTEMIC AWARENESS
Abstract
If AI is understood as an epistemic infrastructure redefining the production and validation of knowledge, and LLMs as statistical language simulators, the issue is not only what they answer, but when and why their answers are accepted as knowledge. The study draws on media as cognitive environments reorganising perception, language and epistemic authority (McLuhan, 1964), and on digital cognitive capital as critical, interpretive and metacognitive resources that orient subjects in informational environments (de Kerckhove, 2025). Generative AI is examined as a socio-technical network of subjects, models, sources and interfaces (Latour, 2005), and as a threshold between cognitive extension and delegation (Clark, 2008). The contribution presents the design and preliminary exploratory findings of a pedagogical study conducted with Socrate, an orchestrated RAG system, as a methodological environment for showing the conditions producing the authority and plausibility of AI-generated answers.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.32043/gsd.v10i4.1848
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Italian Journal of Health Education, Sports and Inclusive Didactics
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ISSN: 2532-3296 E-ISSN: 3103-5744