ABSTRACT
Imagine that you are standing on a bridge above a highway checking off the makes and models of the cars that are passing underneath. Or that you are a postal clerk dividing envelopes into bundles; or a laboratory technician sorting samples of bacteria into species and subspecies. Or imagine that you are making a list of the fossils in your museum, or of the guests in your hotel on a certain night. In each of these cases you are employing a certain grid of labeled cells, and you are recognizing certain objects as being located in those cells. Such a grid of labeled cells is an example of what we shall call a granular partition. We shall argue that granular partitions are involved in all naming, listing, sorting, counting, cataloguing and mapping activities. Division into units, counting and parceling out, mapping, listing, sorting, pigeonholing, cataloguing are activities performed by human beings in their traffic with the world. Partitions are the cognitive devices designed and built by human beings to fulfill these various listing, mapping and classifying purposes.
