Lave and March deliberately increased the dependencies among their thought trials by using words that include the earlier words to move toward a higher level of generality with respect to a single problem. In doing so, however, they treated people (male and female humans) as a synonym for men, a substitution which feminist scholars (e.g., Harding, 1986; Spivak, 1987) would question. Thus, the thought trial, in becoming more general, also becomes less capable of solving the problem of why little white males start arguments in the presence of big white males. The thought trial is less able to solve the theoretical problem because it is generated within a weak classification scheme (people are pretty much alike) that is insensitive to