Final Remarks

We tried to give an account for situoids and situations in the ontology of GOL. Our attempt is incomplete, and can perhaps never be completed. Because situoids are complex, integrated entities, part of a world that can be comprehended as a whole, many properties depend on fundamental philosophical views that have been debated for centuries and will probably never be uniformly resolved.

In order to discuss some of the features of situoids, we had to take side in the discussion about the problem of universals. We did not take side in this debate for the classical beliefs of realists, nominalists or other fractions, but acknowledged the existence of different types of universals: universals existing in re, universals as concepts and even gestalten.

We acknowledge the existence of substances, and believe they are more than a bundle of properties.

We believe that there are several strata of reality, and they are different in that they define different categories. The physical stratum consists of temporally extended entities, sometimes called processes, here situoids. But on other strata, the mental and perhaps the social stratum, entities may exist at time points, boundaries of time intervals. Again, this decision is not in agreement with all philosophers.

Many more decisions of this kind had to be made by us, for example regarding states of affairs and infons, events and processes, and probably hoards of philosophers would criticize us harshly, and perhaps they would be right.

This was our first attempt of a mainly philosophical work. We hope, there are not too many errors in this thesis, so it will withstand some criticism, and may be be useful for some research, and at least parts of the ideas develop here can be integrated into the ontology of GOL, because this was our goal.