# Symbolic AI **Domain:** Artificial Intelligence / Knowledge Representation / Reasoning **Doc Type:** Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed **Related:** [[Artificial Intelligence]], [[Symbolic Representation]], [[Ontology]], [[Inference]], [[Neuro-Symbolic AI]] --- ## Definition **Symbolic AI** is the family of artificial-intelligence methods that represent knowledge through explicit symbols, rules, relations and formal structures and operate on those representations through search or inference. Its strengths include inspectable structure, compositional reasoning and explicit constraints. Its limitations include brittle hand-built representations, difficulty grounding symbols in perception and action, and the cost of maintaining complex knowledge systems. ## Corpus Function Symbolic AI links the ontology work itself to the history of machine reasoning. A wiki graph is not an intelligent system merely because it contains symbols; intelligence depends on how representations are grounded, revised, related and used. ## Key Insight **Explicit representation makes reasoning legible, but legibility does not by itself guarantee truth, grounding or understanding.**