The study of individual differences in both cognition and personality has been greatly influenced by the idea of ordered, and even linearly ordered, responses. Some answers are more correct than others, some people are smarter than others, some people are more neurotic, extroverted, conscientious, etc. than others. This conceptualization has lead to powerful statistical tools for analyzing such data. There has also been feedback, a 'good theory' has become one for which the statistical tools provide a reasonable answer. While there is a good deal to be said for such reasoning, there are other situations in which answers are qualitatively different but not clearly ordered. People can display consistent patterns of thinking in such situations, without one pattern necessarily indicating a smarter person than other patterns do. However we have lacked tools to analyze such data. In this talk I will present the problem formally, present some new tools for analyzing qualitative cognitive and personality data, and illustrate their use with examples drawn from education and politics.