Entity
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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An entity is something that has a distinct, separate existence, although it need not be a material existence. In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities. In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is animate.
An entity could be viewed as a set containing subsets. In philosophy, such sets are said to be abstract objects.
Sometimes, the word entity is used in a general sense of a being, whether or not the referent has material existence; e.g., is often referred to as an entity with no corporeal form, such as a language. It is also often used to refer to ghosts and other spirits.
Taken further, entity sometimes refers to existence or being itself. For example, the former U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan once said that "the policy of the government of the United States is to seek ... to preserve Chinese territorial and administrative entity."
"Entities" are used in system developmental models that display communications and internal processing of, say, documents compared to order processing.
The word entitative is the adjective form of the noun entity. Something that is entitative is "considered as pure entity; abstracted from all circumstances", that is, regarded as entity alone, apart from attendant circumstances.
See also
- Boltzmann brain, a hypothesized self-aware entity.
- Digital identity
- Entity class
- Entity realism, a form of scientific realism.
- Object (philosophy)
- Ontology, the study of being, existence and entities
- Zionist entity
