The Quiet Handover: Epistemic Outsourcing in The Postdigital Condition

Learners, teachers, and researchers increasingly use Generative AI (GenAI) to search, write, explain, verify, and make sense of information. GenAI does not only support those practices; it also influences what appears credible, whose judgement is trusted, and where the work of justification takes place. Therefore, the central educational problem is not whether scholars use GenAI, but that the work of checking sources, weighing evidence, justifying claims, and deciding what to believe may gradually be handed over to algorithmic systems, often without being noticed. Digital skills and competence frameworks address part of this challenge, but they do not fully capture its dispositional dimension. Drawing on virtue epistemology, critical theory of technology, social epistemology, and postdigital theory, the article proposes epistemic resilience as a central educational virtue: the disposition to notice epistemic delegation, examine it critically, and reclaim responsibility for judgement when it matters. Without such resilience, education risks cultivating fluent users of GenAI rather than responsible participants in shared practices of knowledge, judgement, and democratic life.