What Is Structuring?

The concept of "structure" is exhaustively defined across mathematics, cognitive science, and socialtheory. Yet "structuring" -- the cognitive act of imposing structure -- lacks a minimal formal definition. Wepropose that structuring consists of two recursively applied operations: element identification andrelation specification. We introduce recursion depth N as a characteristic of the process, formalizingSimon's (1973) observation that problem structure is solver-dependent. Crucially, we show that whenthe concept of structure migrated from mathematics to other disciplines, the foundational premises ofset theory -- which silently guaranteed well-definedness, mutual exclusivity, and collectiveexhaustiveness -- did not migrate with it. The popular heuristic MECE is a belated attempt to recoverthese lost premises. This analysis clarifies what structuring requires and why it so often fails outsidemathematics.