ENTITY

An 'entity' is something that has a distinct, separate existence, though 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. Entities are used in system developments as models that display communications and internal processing of, say, documents compared to order processing.
An entity could be viewed as a set containing subsets. In philosophy, such sets are said to be abstract objects.
The word ''entity'' is often useful when one wants to refer to something that could be a human being, a non-human animal, a non-thinking life-form such as a plant or fungus, a lifeless object, or even a belief; for instance. In this way, ''entity'' could be seen as a "catch all"-word.
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. Taken further, ''entity'' sometimes refers to existence or being itself. For example, the former U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan said once that "the policy of the government of the United States is to seek . . . to preserve Chinese territorial and administrative ''entity''."
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.
In law, an 'entity' is something capable of bearing legal rights and obligations. It generally means "legal entity" or "artificial person" but also includes "natural person".

Contents

Related concepts

Specialized uses

See also

Related concepts

★ Being

★ Entitativity in psychology

★ Individual

★ Object in philosophy

★ Person

★ Polity

★ Resource in computer science

Specialized uses

★ A DBMS 'entity' is ''either'' a thing in the modelled world ''or'' a drawing element in an ERD.

★ A SUMO, 'Entity' is the root node and stands for the universal class of individuals.

★ In VHDL, 'entity' is the keyword for defining a new object.

★ An SGML 'entity' is an abbreviation for some expanded piece of SGML text.

★ An open systems architecture 'entity' is an active routine within a layer.

★ Zionist 'entity' is a pejorative term for Israel

★ In computer games and game engines, 'entity' is a dynamic object such as a non-player character or item.

See also

★ Ontology, the study of being, existence and 'entities'

★ Entity realism, a form of scientific realism.