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Full Idea
Because parts of our experience of the world are complexly continuous, it is occasionally necessary to impose boundaries to produce categories at all.
Gist of Idea
Continuous experience sometimes needs imposition of boundaries to create categories
Source
Roy Ellen (Anthropological Studies of Classification [1996], p.33)
Book Ref
Ellen,Roy: 'The Categorical Impulse' [Bergahn Books 2008], p.33
A Reaction
I like it. Ellen says that people tend to universally cut nature somewhere around the joints, but we can't cope with large things, so the sea tends to be labelled in sections, even though most of the world's seas are continuous.